The Austrian playwright, novelist, and poet Thomas Bernhard (1931-89) is acknowledged as among the major writers of our times. At once pessimistic and exhilarating, Bernhard's work depicts the corruption of the modern world, the dynamics of totalitarianism, and the interplay of reality and appearance.
In this stunning translation of "The Voice Imitator," Bernhard gives us one of his most darkly comic works. A series of parable-like anecdotes--some drawn from newspaper reports, some from conversation, some from hearsay--this satire is both subtle and acerbic. What initially appear to be quaint little stories inevitably indict the sterility and callousness of modern life, not just in urban centers but everywhere. Bernhard presents an ordinary world careening into absurdity and disaster. Politicians, professionals, tourists, civil servants--the usual victims of Bernhard's inspired misanthropy--succumb one after another to madness, mishap, or suicide. The shortest piece, titled "Mail," illustrates the anonymity and alienation that have become standard in contemporary society: "For years after our mother's death, the Post Office still delivered letters that were addressed to her. The Post Office had taken no notice of her death."
In his disarming, sometimes hilarious style, Bernhard delivers a lethal punch with every anecdote. George Steiner has connected Bernhard to "the great constellation of Kafka, Musil, and Broch," and John Updike has compared him to Grass, Handke, and Weiss. "The Voice Imitator" reminds us that Thomas Bernhard remains the most caustic satirist of our age.

The Swiss writer Friedrich Durrenmatt (1921-90) was one of the most important literary figures of the second half of the twentieth century. During the years of the cold war, arguably only Beckett, Camus, Sartre, and Brecht rivaled him as a presence in European letters. Yet outside Europe, this prolific author is primarily known for only one work, "The Visit," With these long-awaited translations of his plays, fictions, and essays, Durrenmatt becomes available again in all his brilliance to the English-speaking world.
Durrenmatt's concerns are timeless, but they are also the product of his Swiss vantage during the cold war: his key plays, gathered in the first volume of "Selected Writings," explore such themes as guilt by passivity, the refusal of responsibility, greed and political decay, and the tension between justice and freedom. In "The Visit," for instance, an old lady who becomes the wealthiest person in the world returns to the village that cast her out as a young woman and offers riches to the town in exchange for the life of the man, now its mayor, who once disgraced her. Joel Agee's crystalline translation gives a fresh lease to this play, as well as four others: "The Physicists," "Romulus the Great," "Hercules and the Augean Stables," and "The Marriage of Mr. Mississippi,"
Durrenmatt has long been considered a great writer--but one unfairly neglected in the modern world of letters. With these elegantly conceived and expertly translated volumes, a new generation of readers will rediscover his greatest works.

What makes a city endure and prosper? In this masterful survey of a thousand years of urban architecture, Wolfgang Braunfels identified certain themes common to cities as different as Siena and London, Munich and Venice. Most important is an architecture that expresses the city's personality and most particularly its political personality. Braunfels describes and classifies scores of cities--cathedral cities, city-state, maritime cities, imperial cities--and examines the links between their political and architectural histories. Lavishly illustrated with city plans, bird's-eye views, early renderings, and modern photographs, this book will delight and instruct architects, urban planners, historians, and travelers.

The state of exile is often described as being without a country. Born in Tehran but living in Germany, the eminent Iranian writer Said has suffered two forms of exile. Estranged from Iran for political reasons, he was also separated from his mother shortly after his birth when his parents divorced. At the age of forty-three, however, Said received word that his mother was traveling abroad and wanted to see him. Landscapes of a Distant Mother is the account of his journey to her and their wrenching reunion. An autobiography of longing and loss, the book offers a haunting portrait of a son's broken relationship with his mother and the Islamic dictatorship that shadows both their lives. Landscapes of a Distant Mother gives English-speaking readers an introduction to one of Europe's most important immigrant writers. Unsentimental and spare, the book chronicles the discomfiting sensation of viewing one's mother as a stranger and all the psychological implications of their mutual disappointment. Said's distance from his mother - whom he describes almost clinically, with her "particular way of speaking, the style laced with religious formulas, inclined to emotionalism, self-pity and expletives" - becomes a measure of the alienation he feels from everything around him. In this sharp, extended letter to his mother, Said gives voice to the full meaning of modern exile - its political force, profound sadness, and perpetual yearning.

""Art history after modernism" does not only mean that art looks different today; it also means that our discourse on art has taken a different direction, if it is safe to say it has taken a direction at all,"
So begins Hans Belting's brilliant, iconoclastic reconsideration of art and art history at the end of the millennium, which builds upon his earlier and highly successful volume, "The End of the History of Art?," "Known for his striking and original theories about the nature of art," according to the "Economist," Belting here examines how art is made, viewed, and interpreted today. Arguing that contemporary art has burst out of the frame that art history had built for it, Belting calls for an entirely new approach to thinking and writing about art. He moves effortlessly between contemporary issues--the rise of global and minority art and its consequences for Western art history, installation and video art, and the troubled institution of the art museum--and questions central to art history's definition of itself, such as the distinction between high and low culture, art criticism versus art history, and the invention of modernism in art history. Forty-eight black and white images illustrate the text, perfectly reflecting the state of contemporary art.
With "Art History after Modernism," Belting retains his place as one of the most original thinkers working in the visual arts today.

""Art history after modernism" does not only mean that art looks different today; it also means that our discourse on art has taken a different direction, if it is safe to say it has taken a direction at all."
So begins Hans Belting's brilliant, iconoclastic reconsideration of art and art history at the end of the millennium, which builds upon his earlier and highly successful volume, "The End of the History of Art?." "Known for his striking and original theories about the nature of art," according to the "Economist," Belting here examines how art is made, viewed, and interpreted today. Arguing that contemporary art has burst out of the frame that art history had built for it, Belting calls for an entirely new approach to thinking and writing about art. He moves effortlessly between contemporary issues--the rise of global and minority art and its consequences for Western art history, installation and video art, and the troubled institution of the art museum--and questions central to art history's definition of itself, such as the distinction between high and low culture, art criticism versus art history, and the invention of modernism in art history. Forty-eight black and white images illustrate the text, perfectly reflecting the state of contemporary art.
With "Art History after Modernism," Belting retains his place as one of the most original thinkers working in the visual arts today.