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Operation Heartbreak
Duff Cooper; Foreword by Michael Hofmann
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R420
R345
Discovery Miles 3 450
Save R75 (18%)
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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The Twilight World - A Novel
Werner Herzog; Translated by Michael Hofmann
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R404
R335
Discovery Miles 3 350
Save R69 (17%)
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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'One of the greatest novels ever written' Philippe Sands Set
against the doomed splendour of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, The
Radetzky March tells the story of the celebrated Trotta family,
tracing their rise and fall over three generations. Theirs is a
sweeping history of heroism and duty, desire and compromise,
tragedy and heartbreak, a story that lasts until the darkening eve
of World War One, when all is set to fall apart. Rich, epic and
profoundly moving, The Radetzky March is Joseph Roth's timeless
masterpiece.
In 1920, Joseph Roth, the most renowned German correspondent of his
age, arrived in Berlin, the capital of the Weimar Republic. He
produced a series of impressionistic and political writings that
influenced an entire generation of writers, including Thomas Mann
and the young Christopher Isherwood. Roth, like no other German
writer of his time, ventured beyond Berlin's official veneer to the
heart of the city, chronicling the lives of its forgotten
inhabitants - the Jewish immigrants, the criminals, the bathhouse
denizens, and the nameless dead who filled the morgues. Warning
early on of the threat posed by the Nazis, Roth evoked a landscape
of moral bankruptcy and debauched beauty, creating in the process
an unforgettable portrait of a city.
The Emperor's Tomb is a magically evocative, haunting elegy to the
vanished world of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and to the passing
of time and the loss of youth and friends. Prophetic and regretful,
intuitive and exact, Roth's acclaimed novel is the tale of one
man's struggle to come to terms with the uncongenial society of
post-First World War Vienna and the first intimations of Nazi
barbarities.
A collection of Kafka's greatest short fiction, translated by
Michael Hofmann Kafka's masterpiece of unease and black humour,
Metamorphosis, the story of an ordinary man transformed into an
insect, is brought together in this collection with the rest of his
works that he thought worthy of publication. It includes
Contemplation, a collection of his earlier short studies; The
Judgement, written in a single night of frenzied creativity; The
Stoker, the first chapter of a novel set in America; and an
eyewitness account of an air display. Together, these stories,
fragments and miniature gems reveal the breadth of his vision, his
sense of the absurd, and above all his acute, uncanny wit.
Translated with an introduction by Michael Hofmann
"Unformed Landscape" begins in a small village on a fjord in the
Finnmark, on the northeastern coast of Norway, where the borders
between Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia lie covered in snow and
darkness, where the real borders are between day and night, summer
and winter, and between people. Here, a sensitive young woman like
Kathrine finds few outlets for her desires. Half Norwegian, half
Sami (an indigenous people), Kathrine works for the customs office
inspecting the fishing boats arriving regularly in the harbor. She
is in her late 20s, has a son from an early marriage, and has
drifted into a second loveless marriage to a man whose cold and
dominating conventionality forms a bold stroke through the unformed
landscape of her life. After she makes a discovery about her
husband that deeply wounds her, Kathrine cuts loose from her
moorings and her confusion and sets off in search of herself.
Her journey begins aboard a ship headed south, taking her below the
Arctic Circle for the first time in her life. Kathrine makes her
way to France and has the bittersweet experience of a love affair
that flares and dies quickly, her starved senses rewarded by the
shimmering beauty of Paris. Through a series of poignant
encounters, Kathrine is led to the richer life she was meant to
have and is brave enough to claim.
Using simple words strung together in a melodic alphabet, Peter
Stamm introduces us, through a series of intimate sketches, to the
heart of an unforgettable woman. Her story speaks eloquently about
solitude, the fragility of love, lost illusions, and
self-discovery.
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Our Philosopher (Paperback)
Gert Hofmann; Translated by Eric Mace-Tessler; Introduction by Michael Hofmann
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R386
R322
Discovery Miles 3 220
Save R64 (17%)
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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'A hugely significant and wonderfully haunting collection' William
Boyd In the 1920s and 1930s, Joseph Roth travelled extensively in
Europe, living in hotels and writing about the towns through which
he passed and the people he encountered. Collected in one volume,
his experiences in Italy, Germany, Russia, Albania and Ukraine form
a series of tender vignettes that capture life in the inter-war
years. Evocative, curious and sharply observed, these literary
postcards document a continent clinging to tradition while on the
brink of further upheaval.
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The Lost Writings (Hardcover)
Franz Kafka; Edited by 'Reiner Stach; Translated by Michael Hofmann
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R424
Discovery Miles 4 240
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Ships in 9 - 15 working days
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Selected by the preeminent Kafka biographer and scholar Reiner
Stach and newly translated by the peerless Michael Hofmann, the
seventy-four pieces gathered here have been lost to sight for
decades and two of them have never been translated into English
before. Some stories are several pages long; some run about a page;
a handful are only a few lines long: all are marvels. Even the most
fragmentary texts are revelations. These pieces were drawn from two
large volumes of the S. Fischer Verlag edition Nachgelassene
Schriften und Fragmente (totaling some 1100 pages). "Franz Kafka is
the master of the literary fragment," as Stach comments in his
afterword: "In no other European author does the proportion of
completed and published works loom quite so...small in the overall
mass of his papers, which consist largely of broken-off
beginnings." In fact, as Hofmann recently added: "'Finished' seems
to me, in the context of Kafka, a dubious or ironic condition,
anyway. The more finished, the less finished. The less finished,
the more finished. Gregor Samsa's sister Grete getting up to
stretch in the streetcar. What kind of an ending is that?! There's
perhaps some distinction to be made between 'finished' and 'ended.'
Everything continues to vibrate or unsettle, anyway. Reiner Stach
points out that none of the three novels were 'completed.' Some
pieces break off, or are concluded, or stop-it doesn't
matter!-after two hundred pages, some after two lines. The gusto,
the friendliness, the wit with which Kafka launches himself into
these things is astonishing."
The first poem in Gottfried Benn's first book, Morgue (1912) -
written in an hour, published in a week, and notorious ever after,
or so the poet claimed - with its scandalous closing image of an
aster sewn into a corpse by a playful medical student, set him on
his celebrated path. And indeed, mortality, flowers, and powerful
aesthetic collisions typify much of Benn's subsequent work. Over
decades, as he suffered the vicissitudes of an often hostile fate -
the death of his mother from untreated cancer; the death of his
first wife Edith in 1922; his brief but disastrous attempt to
ingratiate himself with the Nazis in 1933, followed by their
persecution of him; the suicide of his second wife Herta in 1945,
afraid she would fall into the hands of the Russians - the harsh,
sometimes callous voice of the poems relented, softened, and
mellowed. The later Benn - from which Impromptus is chiefly drawn,
many of the poems translated into English for the first time - is
deeply affecting: the routines and sorrows and meditations of an
intelligent, pessimistic, and experienced man. Written in what T.
S. Eliot called the 'third voice' of poetry, the low un-upholstered
monologue of the poet talking to himself, these poems are slender
ribbons of speech on the naked edge of song and silence. With this
new collection of poems selected and translated by Michael Hofmann,
Gottfired Benn, at long last, promises to attain in English the
presence and importance that he so richly deserves.
Reading Habermas: Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere
dissolves Habermas's monolithic stylization to precisely access his
seminal distinction between the purely political polis of
antiquity, which excludes the private economy from the res publica,
and the modern public sphere with its rational-critical discourse
about commodity exchange and social labor in the political economy.
Deconstructing the uniform mold of Structural Transformation's
narrative about a rise and fall of the bourgeois public sphere in
modernity also allows to identify and understand the
ideology-critical methodologies of Habermas's theory reconstruction
of Kant's ideal of the liberal public in the context of the French
Revolution. Readers of this guide realize that Habermas's
interpretation of a sociological and political category with the
norms of constitutional theory and intellectual history causes the
"collapsing of norm and description" he acknowledged in 1989 and
thus frequent misunderstandings about the historical validity of
Structural Transformation's ideal-type derived from Condorcet's
absolute rationalism and Kant's "unofficial" philosophy of history.
Specifically, the guide explains that Habermas's key construct of a
"morally pretentious rationality" of the bourgeois public sphere
entirely depends on the claim about "natural laws" harmoniously
regulating the economy. While neoliberalism still maintains this
claim, Hegel "decisively destroyed" it already in 1821.
A man and a woman meet in a park. The man has a story to share, one
of a past relationship that contains echoes, similarities to the
woman's life too remarkable to be considered just a coincidence.
And so the lines of reality begin to blur. Is the man a warning
from the future? Is the woman destined to repeat the same mistakes?
Who really exists? Is there such thing as fate?
'If I think about it, and I have the time and inclination and
capacity to do so, we dogs are an odd lot.' How does a dog see the
world? How do any of us? In this playful and enigmatic story of a
canine philosopher, Kafka explores the limits of knowledge. Penguin
Modern: fifty new books celebrating the pioneering spirit of the
iconic Penguin Modern Classics series, with each one offering a
concentrated hit of its contemporary, international flavour. Here
are authors ranging from Kathy Acker to James Baldwin, Truman
Capote to Stanislaw Lem and George Orwell to Shirley Jackson;
essays radical and inspiring; poems moving and disturbing; stories
surreal and fabulous; taking us from the deep South to modern
Japan, New York's underground scene to the farthest reaches of
outer space.
Japan's capital city of Kyoto was devastated by earthquake, storm,
and fire in the late 12th century. Retreating from "this unkind
world," the poet and Buddhist priest Kamo-no-Chomei left the
capital for the forested mountains, where he eventually constructed
his famous "ten-foot-square" hut. From this solitary vantage point
Chomei produced "Hojoki," an extraordinary literary work that
describes all he has seen of human misery and his new life of
simple chores, walks, and acts of kindness. Yet at the end he
questions his own sanity and the integrity of his purpose. Has he
perhaps grown too attached to his detachment?
First new collection of poems since Approximately Nowhere (1999).
This novella, one of the most haunting things that Joseph Roth ever
composed, was published in 1939, the year the author died. Like
Andreas, the hero of the story, Roth drank himself to death in
Paris, but this is not an autobiographical confession. Rather, it
is a secular miracle-tale, in which the vagrant Andreas, after
living under bridges, has a surprising run of good luck that
changes his circumstances profoundly. The novella is
extraordinarily compressed, dry-eyed and witty, despite its
melancholic subject matter.
Set in Romania at the height of Ceauescu's reign of terror, "The
Land of Green Plums" tells the story of a group of young people who
leave the impoverished province for the city in search of better
prospects and camaraderie. But their hopes are ravaged, because the
city, no less than the countryside, bears everywhere the mark of
the dictatorship's corrosive touch. All the narrator's
friends--teachers and students of vaguely dissident
allegiance--betray her, do away with themselves, or both. As they
do so, we see the way the totalitarian state comes to inhabit every
human realm and how everyone, even the strongest, must either bend
to the oppressors or resist them and thereby perish.
Herta Muller, herself a survivor of Ceausescu's police state,
speaks from intimate experience. Scene by scene, in language at
once harsh and poetic, she constructs a devastating picture of a
society and a generation ruined by fear. In simple images of
hieroglyphic power--policeman filling their pockets and mouths with
green plums; girls sleeping with abattoir workers for bags of
offal; a docile proletariat making things no one wants--"tin sheep
and wooden watermelons"--Muller anatomizes a country and its
citizens and the corruption that has rotted the core of both.
Habermas's Public Sphere: A Critique analyzes the evolution of
Juergen Habermas's social and political theory from the 1950s to
the present by focusing on the explicit and on the tacit changes in
his thinking about The Structural Transformation of the Public
Sphere, his global academic bestseller, which has been translated
into 30 languages. Integrating "public sphere," "discourse," and
"reason," the three categories at the center of his lifelong work
as a scholar and as a public intellectual, Habermas's classic
public sphere concept has deeply influenced an unusually high
number of disciplines in the social sciences and in the humanities.
In the process, its complex methodology, whose sources are not
always identified, can be perplexing and therefore lead to
misunderstandings. While Habermas's "Further Reflections on the
Public Sphere" (1992) contain several far-reaching clarifications,
they still do not identify a number of the most important sources
for his methodology, above all Herbert Marcuse and Ernst Bloch.
Hence, a key purpose of this study is to thoroughly analyze the
Marxist critique of ideology that Habermas uses in dialectical
fashion for his theory reconstruction of Immanuel Kant's liberal
ideal of a rational-critical public as the organizational principle
of the constitutional state and as the method of Enlightenment.
Such dialectical thinking allows him to appropriate the structure
of Reinhart Koselleck's Critique and Crisis and of Carl Schmitt's
writings on the modern state while simultaneously upending their
conservative critique of Liberalism and of the Enlightenment.
However, this strategy restricts the application of his concept to
his stylizations of the French Revolution and of his British "model
case." This critique reinvigorates Habermas's seminal distinction
between the purely political polis of antiquity, which excludes the
private economy from the res publica, and the modern public sphere
with its rational-critical discourse about commodity exchange and
social labor in the political economy. At the same time, it
identifies the crises of seventeenth-century England and the Dutch
Republic as the origins of the new channels of public communication
used to constantly evaluate the role of state power as political
facilitator and regulator of an increasingly complex, dynamic, and
crisis-prone market economy.
A new novel of artful understatement about mortality, estrangement,
and the absurdity of life from the acclaimed author of "Unformed
Landscape" and "In Strange Gardens"
On a day like any other, Andreas changes his life. When a routine
doctor's visit leads to an unexpected prognosis, a great yearning
takes hold of him--but who can tell if it is homesickness or
wanderlust? Andreas leaves everything behind, sells his Paris
apartment; cuts off all social ties; quits his teaching job; and
waves goodbye to his days spent idly sitting in cafes--to look for
a woman he once loved, half a lifetime ago. The monotony of days
has been keeping him in check; now he hopes for a miracle and for a
new beginning.
Andreas' travels lead him back to the province of his youth, back
to his hometown in Switzerland where he returns to familiar
streets, where his brother still lives in their childhood home, and
where Fabienne, a woman he was obsessed with in his youth, visits
the same lake they once swam in together. Andreas, still consumed
with longing for his lost love and blinded by the uncertainty of
his future, is tormented by the question of what might have been if
things had happened differently.
Peter Stamm has been praised as a "stylistic ascetic" and his prose
as "distinguished by lapidary expression, telegraphic terseness,
and finely tuned sensitivity" (Bookforum). In "On a Day Like This,"
Stamm's unobtrusive observational style allows us to journey with
our antihero through his crises of banality, of living in his empty
world, and the realization that life is finite--that one must live
it, as long as that is possible.
Praise for Unformed Landscape:
"Sensitive and unnerving. . . . An uncommonly intimate work, one
that will remind the reader of his or her own lived experience with
a greater intensity than many of the books that are published right
here at home." --The New Republic Online
"If Albert Camus had lived in an age when people in remote
Norwegian fishing villages had e-mail, he might have written a
novel like this."--The New Yorker
"Unformed Landscape has a refreshing purity, a lack of delusion, a
lack of hype."--Los Angeles Times
This collection of new translations brings together the small
proportion of Kafka's works that he himself thought worthy of
publication. It includes Metamorphosis, his most famous work, an
exploration of horrific transformation and alienation; Meditation,
a collection of his earlier studies; The Judgement, written in a
single night of frenzied creativity; The Stoker, the first chapter
of a novel set in America and a fascinating occasional piece, and
The Aeroplanes at Brescia, Kafka's eyewitness account of an air
display in 1909. Together, these stories reveal the breadth of
Kafka's literary vision and the extraordinary imaginative depth of
his thought.
Joseph Roth, the greatest European newspaper correspondent of his
age, left the splintering Weimar Republic for Paris in 1925 and, as
an Austrian Jew, was exiled there for the rest of his life.
Collected together here for the first time in English, these
exhilarating pieces evoke a world of suppleness, beauty and
promise. From the port town of Marseilles to the Riviera of Nice
and Monte Carlo, to the exotic hill country around Avignon, from
the socialist workers and cattlemen with whom Roth ate breakfast,
to prostitutes and Sunday bullfighters, The White Cities is not
only a swan song to a European order that could no longer hold but
also a beautifully crafted and revelatory work.
The legendary Austro-Hungarian novelist and essayist, Joseph Roth,
was born in Ukraine in 1894 and died tragically in Paris in 1939.
These letters span the breadth of Roth's life, from the schoolboy
to the veteran of 44, marked by war, poverty, alcoholism, the loss
of his wife through madness, and two decades of prolific work. It
is a deeply moving portrait of the life of the writer as an
outsider, in exile from a world he no longer recognized as his own.
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Nadine Gordimer
Paperback
(2)
R383
R318
Discovery Miles 3 180
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