The work of poet Georg Trakl, a leading Austrian-German expressionist, has been praised by many, including his contemporaries Rainer Maria Rilke and Else Lasker-Schuler, as well as his patron Ludwig Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein famously wrote that while he did not truly understand Trakl's poems, they had the tone of a "truly ingenious person," which pleased him.A Skeleton Plays Violin comprises the final volume in a trilogy of works by Trakl published by Seagull Books. This selection gathers Trakl's early, middle, and late work, none of it published in book form during his lifetime. The work here ranges widely, from his haunting prose pieces to his darkly beautiful poems documenting the first bloody weeks of World War I on the Eastern Front. Book Three of Our Trakl the series that began with Trakl's first book Poems and his posthumously published Sebastian Dreaming also includes translations of unpublished poems and significant variants. Interpolated throughout this comprehensive and chronological selection is a biographical essay that provides more information about Trakl's gifted and troubled life, especially as it relates to his poetry, as well as the necessary context of his relationship with his favorite sibling, his sister Grete, whose role as a muse to her brother is still highly controversial. Trakl's life was mysterious and fascinating, a fact reflected in his work. A Skeleton Plays Violin should not be missed.

From the 1920s through the 1950s, Bertolt Brecht wrote a number of short, fictionalized comments on contemporary life, politics, and thought. Through the dramatic events of the first half of the twentieth century, Brecht's Mr. Keuner offered up aphorisms, stray thoughts, and fragments of anecdote that punctured contemporary self-regard about religion, politics, business, and more. Deceptively light in tone, and bite-size in presentation, Mr. Keuner's comments bring Brecht's lacerating wit to bear on a wide range of the half-truths and public lies of his era. This graphic novel adaptation sets a number of Brecht's Mr. Keuner pieces, newly translated, alongside cartoons by German artist Ulf K., whose spare, abstract style lends force to the underlying meanings of Keuner's pronouncements.

Thousands upon thousands of books have been written about Immanuel Kant since his death. None, let's be clear, have been quite like what we have here. In Party Fun with Kant, Nicolas Mahler tells the story of Kant--and his fellow serious-minded figures from the history of philosophy--with a comic edge. With his witty visual style and clever wordplay, he delves into their lives and emerges with hitherto unknown scenes that show them in a new (and far less serious) light. We go to parties with Kant, visit an art exhibition with Hegel, shop at the supermarket with Nietzsche, and go to the cinema with Deleuze, and celebrate the dream wedding with de Beauvoir. In each case, we come away knowing more about the life, thoughts, and feelings of the philosopher--getting to know them as people rather than as stony-faced figures long since robbed of any existence beyond their ideas. The result is pure fun, but with plenty of insight, too.

Bernhard's Collected Poem is a key to understanding Bernhard's irascible black comedy found in virtually all of his writings-even down to his last will and testament. Beloved Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard (1931-89) began his career in the early 1950s as a poet. Over the next decade, Bernhard wrote thousands of poems and published four volumes of intensely wrought and increasingly personal verse, with such titles as On Earth and in Hell, In Hora Mortis, and Under the Iron of the Moon. Bernhard's early poetry, bearing the influence of Georg Trakl, begins with a deep connection to his Austrian homeland. As his poems saw publication and recognition, Bernhard seemed always on the verge of joining the ranks of Ingeborg Bachmann, Paul Celan, and other young post-war poets writing in German. During this time, however, his poems became increasingly more obsessive, filled with undulant self-pity, counterpointed by a defamatory, bardic voice utterly estranged from his country, all of which resulted in a magisterial work of anti-poetry-one that represents Bernhard's own harrowing experience with his leitmotif of success and failure, which makes his fiction such a pleasure. There is much to be found in these pages for Bernhard fans of every stripe.

This collection of four stories by the writer George Steiner called “one of the masters of European fiction� is, as longtime fans of Thomas Bernhard would expect, bleakly comic and inspiringly rancorous. The subject of his stories vary: in one, Goethe summons Wittgenstein to discuss the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus; “Montaigne: A Story (in 22 Installments)� tells of a young man sealing himself in a tower to read; “Reunion,� meanwhile, satirizes that very impulse to escape; and the final story rounds out the collection by making Bernhard himself a victim, persecuted by his greatest enemy—his very homeland of Austria. Underpinning all these variously comic, tragic, and bitingly satirical excursions is Bernhard’s abiding interest in, and deep knowledge of, the philosophy of doubt. Bernhard’s work can seem off-putting on first acquaintance, as he suffers no fools and offers no hand to assist the unwary reader. But those who make the effort to engage with Bernhard on his own uncompromising terms will discover a writer with powerful comic gifts, penetrating insight into the failings and delusions of modern life, and an unstinting desire to tell the whole, unvarnished, unwelcome truth. Start here, readers; the rewards are great.

At once a narrative biography and a medical history, Manon's World tells the story of a haunted young woman caught in the middle of a love triangle in interwar Germany. Manon Gropius (1916-1935) was the daughter of Alma Mahler, the widow of Gustav Mahler, and the architect Walter Gropius, the founder of the Bauhaus, and the stepdaughter of the writer Franz Werfel. In Manon's World, James Reidel explores the life and death of a child at the center of a broken love triangle. The story takes a unique course, describing a peripheral figure but in a context where her significance and centrality in the lives of her famous parents and circles comes into relief. Reidel reveals a neglected and fascinating life in a world gone by-Vienna, Venice, and Berlin of the interwar years. Not just a narrative biography, Manon's World is also a medical history of the polio that killed Manon and a personal cultural history of the aspirations projected on her-and seen as lost by such keen observers as Elias Canetti, who devoted two chapters of his Nobel Prize-winning memoirs to his encounters with Manon and her funeral. That event led Alban Berg to dedicate his signature Violin Concerto "to an angel." Reidel reveals a more complex image of a young woman who desired to be an actress and artist in her own right despite being her mother's intended protege, an inspiration to her father who rarely saw her, and her stepfather Franz Werfel, who obsessively wrote her into his novels, beginning with The Forty Days of Musa Dagh and as a revenant in all the books that followed.

This book brings English-language readers works by Walser in a rare form: dramolette. Few writers have ever experienced such a steady rise in their reputation and public profile as Swiss writer Robert Walser (1878-1956) has seen in recent years. As more of his previously little-known work has been translated into English, readers have discovered a unique writer whose off-kilter sensibility and innovations in form are perfectly suited to our fragmented, distracted, bewildering era. The short plays presented here, inspired by the German theater Walser enjoyed in his youth, while never meant to be performed, present scenes, characters, and situations that comment on the brutality of fairy tales, the impossibilities of love, the dark fate of the Christ child (and Walser himself), and more. At the same time, like all of Walser's work they are shot through with a humor that is wholly genuine despite its shades of darkness. Gathering all of Walser's plays, as well as his later, fragmentary dramatic writings, Comedies will be celebrated by the many devoted fans of this lately rediscovered master.

Thomas Bernhard's Old Masters has been called his "most enjoyable novel" by the New York Review of Books. It's a wild satire that takes place almost entirely in front of Tintoretto's White-Bearded Man, on display in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, as two typically Viennese pedants (serving as alter egos for Bernhard himself) irreverently, even contemptuously take down high culture, society, state-supported artists, Heidegger, and much more. It's a book built on thought and conversation rather than action or visuals. Yet somehow celebrated Austrian cartoonist Nicholas Mahler has brought it to life in graphic form and it's brilliant. This volume presents Mahler's typically minimalist cartoons alongside new translations of selected passages from the novel. The result is a version of Old Masters that is strikingly new, yet still true to Bernhard's bleak vision, and to the novel's outrageous proposition that the perfect work of art is truly unbearable to even think about let alone behold.

"Already recognized as a champion of neglected genius, Reidel continues his admirable project by providing American readers with the early verse works of the modern prose master, Thomas Bernhard. This is a beautiful and necessary book. The translations themselves immediately strike me as both accurate and inspired, and are accompanied by a highly readable and erudite introduction which vividly brings to life the young Bernhard and his efforts (alongside older contemporaries such as Krolow, Eich, Bachmann, and Celan) to recreate for literary and moral purposes the great language the Nazis destroyed."--Franz Wright, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry

"Thomas Bernhard was first and possibly foremost a poet, belonging in the company of Georg Trakl and Paul Celan, yet his poetry has remained unremarked and curiously unattended until now, with the publication of James Reidel's masterful translations, wherein Bernhard's German shimmers into an English commensurate with his strangely comedic and mystical cris de coeur. If Bernhard is, as he has been called, 'an instrumentalist of language, ' then Reidel has written for that language a symphony of lyric art, and in so doing, rescued for the world a major twentieth-century poet."--Carolyn Forche, author of "Blue Hour: Poems"

"While Thomas Bernhard's early works of poetry are relatively unknown, they show the ingenious beginnings of the author's ironic and morbid vision, influenced by the poetry of Rilke, Celan, and the expressionist Trakl. James Reidel is an accomplished translator in addition to being a well-known poet himself and he does an excellent job of transposing the poems into a proper English context while preserving theoriginal German sense."--Matthias Konzett, Tufts University, author of "Rhetoric of The National Dissent in Thomas Bernhard, Peter Handke and Elfriede Jelinek"

"I am very taken with James Reidel's translations of these two remarkable volumes of the great Austrian novelist and playwright Thomas Bernhard, who began his career, in the 1950s, as a poet. Here we have these unknown but powerful poems carefully translated and well introduced."--Richard Howard, series editor of the "Lockert Library of Poetry in Translation," and author of "Inner Voices: Selected Poems, 1963-2003"

Critic, novelist, filmmaker, jazz musician, painter, and, above all, poet, Weldon Kees performed, practiced, and published with the best of his generation of artists—the so-called middle generation, which included Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, and John Berryman. His dramatic disappearance (a probable suicide) at the age of forty-one, his movie-star good looks, his role in various movements of the day, and his shifting relationships with key figures in the arts have made him one of the more intriguing—and elusive—artists of the time. In this long-awaited biography, James Reidel presents the first full account of Kees’s troubled yet remarkably accomplished life. Reidel traces Kees’s career from his birth in 1914 and boyhood in Beatrice, Nebraska, to his stint as an award-winning short-story writer and novelist, his rise as a poet and critic in New York, his branching off into abstract expressionism, jazz music, and theater, and his experimental and scientific filmmaking and photography. Going beyond the cult status that has grown up around Kees over the years, this work fairly and judiciously places him as a cultural adventurer at a particularly rich and significant moment in postwar twentieth-century America.

Beloved Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard (1931 89) began his career in the early 1950s as a poet. Over the next decade, Bernhard wrote thousands of poems and published four volumes of intensely wrought and increasingly personal verse, with such titles as On Earth and in Hell, In Hora Mortis, and Under the Iron of the Moon. Bernhard's early poetry, bearing the influence of Georg Trakl, begins with a deep connection to his Austrian homeland. As his poems saw publication and recognition, Bernhard seemed always on the verge of joining the ranks of Ingeborg Bachmann, Paul Celan, and other young post-war poets writing in German. During this time, however, his poems became increasingly more obsessive, filled with an undulant self-pity, counterpointed by a defamatory, bardic voice utterly estranged from his country, all of which resulted in a magisterial work of anti-poetry one that represents Bernhard's own harrowing experience with his leitmotif of success and failure, which makes his fiction such a pleasure. For all of these reasons, Bernhard's Collected Poems, translated into English for the first time by James Reidel, is a key to understanding Bernhard's irascible black comedy found in virtually all of his writings even down to his last will and testament. There is much to be found in these pages for Bernhard fans of every stripe.

Fairy Tales gathers the unconventional verse dramolettes of the Swiss writer Robert Walser. Narrated in Walser's inimitable, playful language, these theatrical pieces overturn traditional notions of the fairy tale, transforming the Brothers Grimm into metatheater, even metareflections. Snow White forgives the evil queen for trying to kill her, Cinderella doubts her prince and enjoys being hated by her evil stepsisters; the Fairy Tale itself is a character who encourages her to stay within the confines of the story. Sleeping Beauty, the royal family, and its retainers are not happy about being woken from their sleep by an absurd, unpretentious, Walser-like hero. Mary and Joseph are taken aback by what lies in store for their baby Jesus.

Alvin Levin, himself from the Bronx, captured life in the turbulent era of the 1930s in New York City. The stories are all told by and outsider artist, a writer who is never able to finish his long novel yet easily writes these small touching portraits about the poor who, in their dance halls and bars, long to live the high-life of the Park Avenue swells. in dance halls, and bars.