The Golem, a creature made of clay and brought to life by Rabbi Leyb of Prague in the sixteenth century, has provided an enticing subject for fiction writers since the legend began. In some works, Rabbi Leyb gives birth to the Golem to help the Jews with the overbearing burden of their work. In others, the Golem is the protector of the Jews, keeping watch during the nights before Passover to make sure that a Gentile does not plant evidence for a blood libel in a Jewish home. But the powerful Golem can also lose control and have to be destroyed. Joachim Neugroschel has brought together some of the best work featuring the Golem, including H. Leivick's masterful blank verse play; Yudl Rosenberg's "pamphlet" full of Golem tales; and stories by S. Bastomski, Dovid Frishman, and Y. L. Peretz, which he translates fluidly from the Yiddish.

Little Clothbound Classics: irresistible, mini editions of short stories, novellas and essays from the world's greatest writers, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith. The gift of a handsomely decorated, enigmatic nutcracker sets the stage for a Christmas like no other: there will be legends of ancient curses, battles with the dreaded Mouse King, and a visit to the wonderful Kingdom of Dolls. The inspiration for the classic ballet, E. T. A. Hoffmann's irresistible tale of magic and mystery continues to be the perfect encapsulation of a child's wonder at Christmas.

One of Elena Ferrante's Top 40 Best Books by Women Erika Kohut teaches piano at the Vienna Conservatory by day. By night she trawls the city's porn shows while her mother, whom she loves and hates in equal measure, waits up for her. Into this emotional pressure-cooker bounds music student and ladies' man Walter Klemmer. With Walter as her student, Erika spirals out of control, consumed by the ecstasy of self-destruction. A haunting tale of morbid voyeurism and masochism, The Piano Teacher, first published in 1983, is Elfreide Jelinek's Masterpiece. Jelinek was awarded the Nobel Prize For Literature in 2004 for her 'musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays that, with extraordinary linguistic zeal, reveal the absurdity of society's cliches and their subjugating power. The Piano Teacher was adapted into an internationally successful film by Michael Haneke, which won three major prizes at Cannes, including the Grand Prize and Best Actress for Isabelle Huppert.

The original stories behind everyone's favorite Christmas ballet
It wasn't until the 1950s that seeing "The Nutcracker" at Christmastime became an American tradition. But the story itself is much older and its original intent more complex. This eye-opening new volume presents two of the tale's earliest versions, both in new translations: E.T.A. Hoffmann's "Nutcracker and Mouse King" (1816), in which a young girl is whisked away to the Land of Toys to help her animated nutcracker defeat the Mouse King, and Alexandre Dumas's 1845 adaptation, "The Tale of the Nutcracker," based on Hoffmann's popular work. Irresistible tales of magic, mystery, and childhood adventure, these timeless delights and fresh interpretations about the importance of imagination will captivate readers of all ages.

One of the great literary figures of the modern age, French novelist Marcel Proust (1871-1922) probes the precarious mental and erotic nuances of love, the frail mysteries of time passing and time past in highly original, surprising tales. Includes a new translation of the complete text of Pleasures and Days, Proust's only short-story collection, and six tales previously uncollected and never before available in English.

Bataille’s first novel, published under the pseudonym ‘Lord Auch’, is still his most notorious work. In this explicit pornographic fantasy, the young male narrator and his lovers Simone and Marcelle embark on a sexual quest involving sadism, torture, orgies, madness and defilement, culminating in a final act of transgression. Shocking and sacreligious, Story of the Eye is the fullest expression of Bataille’s obsession with the closeness of sex, violence and death. Yet it is also hallucinogenic in its power, and is one of the erotic classics of the twentieth century.

'The Tongue Set Free is so beautifully written. It begins wtih an extraordinary image, Canetti's earliest memory. He comes out of a room. A man makes him stick out his tongue; if he talks he will cut it off. Years later Canetti realises that this was his nursemaid's lover, frightening him into silence about their rendezvous. The idea of speaking as the entry into forbidden grown-up life dominates this book. When he is seven his father dies. He is propelled from childhood into adulthood, from his father to his mother, through language. In an extraordinary, cruel episode his mother forces him to learn perfect adult German in three months, to replace her husband as quickly as possible. His tongue is set free: he has won his mother, against brothers , against all lovers. It is the most intense Oedipal relationhsip I have ever seen described and Canetti describes it brilliantly. But it's all extraordinary, and all masterfully written. There are wonderful descriptions of Canetti's first oriental, medieval home in pre-World War l Bulgaria: of his later homes in Manchester, in Vienna, in Switzerland. There are unforgettable portraits. The values of Auto da Fe are given a human history and a human face' New Statesman

NEW STATESMAN BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2015 'Sublime ... it inspires a kind of evangelical cult passion among its devotees' Simon Schama 'Roth is Austria's Chekhov' William Boyd Strauss's Radetzky March, signature tune of one of Europe's most powerful regimes, presides over Joseph Roth's account of three generations of the Trotta family in the years preceding the Austro-Hungarian collapse in 1918. Grandfather, son and grandson are equally dependent on the empire: the first for his enoblement; the second for the civil virtues that make him a meticulous servant of an administration whose failure he can neither comprehend nor survive; the third for the family standards of conduct which he cannot attain but against which he is too enfeebled to rebel.

A major literary event, the publication of this masterly translation makes one of the towering works of twentieth-century German literature available to English-speaking readers for the first time. The three-volume novel The Aesthetics of Resistance is the crowning achievement of Peter Weiss, the internationally renowned dramatist best known for his play Marat/Sade. The first volume, presented here, was initially published in Germany in 1975; the third and final volume appeared in 1981, just six months before Weiss's death. Spanning the period from the late 1930s to World War II, this historical novel dramatizes antifascist resistance and the rise and fall of proletarian political parties in Europe. Living in Berlin in 1937, the unnamed narrator and his peers-sixteen- and seventeen-year-old working-class students-seek ways to express their hatred for the Nazi regime. They meet in museums and galleries, and in their discussions they explore the affinity between political resistance and art, the connection at the heart of Weiss's novel. Weiss suggests that meaning lies in embracing resistance, no matter how intense the oppression, and that we must look to art for new models of political action and social understanding. The novel includes extended meditations on paintings, sculpture, and literature. Moving from the Berlin underground to the front lines of the Spanish Civil War and on to other parts of Europe, the story teems with characters, almost all of whom are based on historical figures. The Aesthetics of Resistance is one of the truly great works of postwar German literature and an essential resource for understanding twentieth-century German history.

From A to Z, the Penguin Drop Caps series collects 26 unique hardcovers--featuring cover art by Jessica Hische
It all begins with a letter. Fall in love with Penguin Drop Caps, a new series of twenty-six collectible and hardcover editions, each with a type cover showcasing a gorgeously illustrated letter of the alphabet. In a design collaboration between Jessica Hische and Penguin Art Director Paul Buckley, the series features unique cover art by Hische, a superstar in the world of type design and illustration, whose work has appeared everywhere from Tiffany & Co. to Wes Anderson's recent film "Moonrise Kingdom" to Penguin's own bestsellers "Committed "and "Rules of Civility." With exclusive designs that have never before appeared on Hische's hugely popular Daily Drop Cap blog, the Penguin Drop Caps series launches with six perennial favorites to give as elegant gifts, or to showcase on your own shelves.
H is for Hesse. A young Brahmin named Siddhartha searches for ultimate reality after meeting with the Buddha. His quest takes him from a life of decadence to asceticism, from the illusory joys of sensual love with a beautiful courtesan, and of wealth and fame, to the painful struggles with his son and the ultimate wisdom of renunciation. Integrating Eastern and Western spiritual traditions with psychoanalysis and philosophy, written with a deep and moving empathy for humanity, Herman Hesse's strangely simple "Siddhartha "is perhaps the most important and compelling moral allegory the troubled twentieth century ever produced.

On a fateful day in May 1941, in Nazi-occupied Strasbourg, seventeen-year- old Pierre Seel was summoned by the Gestapo. This was the beginning of his journey through the horrors of a concentration camp.

For nearly forty years, Seel kept this secret in order to hide his homosexuality. Eventually he decided to speak out, bearing witness to an aspect of the Holocaust rarely seen. This edition, with a new foreword from gay-literature historian Gregory Woods, is an extraordinary firsthand account of the Nazi roundup and the deportation of homosexuals.

'Venus in Furs' describes the obsessions of Severin von Kusiemski, a European nobleman who desires to be enslaved to a woman. Severin finds his ideal of voluptuous cruelty in the merciless Wanda von Dunajew. This is a passionate and powerful portrayal of one man's struggle to enlighten and instruct himself and others in the realm of desire. Published in 1870, the novel gained notoriety and a degree of immortality for its author when the word "masochism" - derived from his name - entered the vocabulary of psychiatry. This remains a classic literary statement on sexual submission and control.

First developed and written in medieval Germany, Yiddish eventually became the everyday speech of Jews all over Europe and later globally. Yiddish was a hybrid language crafted from German, mixed with Hebrew, Judeo-Aramaic, and blended with Italian and French as well as the Slavic languages. It gave rise to a literature that reflected not only Jewish life but also the culture of the lands in which the Jews lived. A descriptive and flavorful language, it was used for genres as diverse as religious tales, fables, humor, social realism, surrealism, and the literary experiments of modern times. "No Star Too Beautiful" is a bountiful anthology that brings together the masterpieces of this now-vanishing tongue. Joachim Neugroschel has chosen stories emblematic of the people and their times, and this volume chronicles both the literary tradition and the history of the people who created it. Indeed, the collection contains the first English translation of medieval Yiddish fiction. Many of the early tales like "Virtuous Joseph" and "Abraham's Childhood" had Biblical roots. But there were also the fables of Moshe Vallikh and such wonder-filled folk tales as "The Princess and the Seven Geese." In the later periods, the stories reflect the varying currents of thought within the Jewish community as well as echoing the changes in Europe. Comic or tragic, Yiddish literature underwent a flowering of writers: Mendele Moykher-Sforim, Yitsik Leybesh Peretz, S. Ansky, Sholem Asch, Y.Y. and Isaac Bashevis Singer, and many others. Compiling and newly translating almost all the stories, Neugroschel has created a seamless effect rarely approached in a work filled with so many voices. This astounding anthology is a lasting gift for generations.

he most famous play in the Yiddish repertoire, S. Ansky's The Dybbuk has been made into two films and three operas and has been staged all over the world. As an extraordinary product of the Yiddish imagination, however, its literary and religious roots have never been thoroughly explored. With a new translation of Ansky's play that conveys its brilliant supernatural poetry, this anthology comprises thirty highly diverse literary masterpieces dating from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. Beginning with the first Yiddish tale about a possession (1602), these works influenced Ansky or formed a cultural and spiritual network that shows us how the era and tradition precipitated the drama. The result is a literary mosaic that shows a vast array of styles, from the earthy simplicity of homespun folk tales to the delicacy and elegance of polished literary expression. Joachim Neugroschel brings together a wide variety of stories, verse narratives, and even modern melodrama--many never before translated into English.

"The Torch in My Ear "is the account of Canetti's young manhood, of his arrival in Vienna in the early 1920s, of his schooling, and of the beginning of his life as a writer.

Heschel's classic work on Maimonides, originally published in Berlin during the thirties, in one of the few scholarly biographies available of the great medieval philosopher.