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Showing 1 - 25 of
123 matches in All Departments
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The Twilight World - A Novel
Werner Herzog; Translated by Michael Hofmann
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R436
R356
Discovery Miles 3 560
Save R80 (18%)
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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.
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Operation Heartbreak
Duff Cooper; Foreword by Michael Hofmann
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R453
R333
Discovery Miles 3 330
Save R120 (26%)
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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'One of the greatest European novelists of the century' Sunday
Times Andreas is an alcoholic and a vagrant who lives under a
bridge. Downtrodden, submerged at the bottom of society, he lives a
fortuitous life - dictated by happenstance and the whims of others
- until a run of exceptionally good luck lifts him, briefly, onto a
different plane of existence. First published after Roth's death in
1939, The Legend of the Holy Drinker is haunting and melancholic,
yet filled with empathy. A secular miracle-tale, it is an
unforgettable testament to Roth's lucidity and compassion.
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.
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Kairos (Hardcover)
Jenny Erpenbeck; Translated by Michael Hofmann
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R714
Discovery Miles 7 140
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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Jenny Erpenbeck’s much anticipated novel Kairos is a complicated love story set amidst swirling, cataclysmic events as the GDR collapses and an old world evaporates
Jenny Erpenbeck (the author of Go, Went, Gone and Visitation) is an epic storyteller and arguably the most powerful voice in contemporary German literature. Erpenbeck’s new novel Kairos―an unforgettably compelling masterpiece―tells the story of the romance begun in East Berlin at the end of the 1980s when nineteen-year-old Katharina meets by chance a married writer in his fifties named Hans. Their passionate yet difficult long-running affair takes place against the background of the declining GDR, through the upheavals wrought by its dissolution in 1989 and then what comes after.
In her unmistakable style and with enormous sweep, Erpenbeck describes the path of two lovers, as Katharina grows up and tries to come to terms with a not always ideal romance, even as a whole world with its own ideology disappears.
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.
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Our Philosopher (Paperback)
Gert Hofmann; Translated by Eric Mace-Tessler; Introduction by Michael Hofmann
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R416
R342
Discovery Miles 3 420
Save R74 (18%)
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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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 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?
Werner Herzog is the undisputed master of extreme cinema: building
an opera house in the middle of the jungle; walking from Munich to
Paris in the dead of winter; descending into an active volcano;
living in the wilderness among grizzly bears - he has always been
intrigued by the extremes of human experience. From his early
movies to his later documentaries, he has made a career out of
exploring the boundaries of human endurance: what we are capable of
in exceptional circumstances and what these situations reveal about
who we really are. But these are not just great cinematic themes.
During the making of his films, Herzog pushed himself and others to
the limits, often putting himself in life-threatening situations.
As a child in rural Bavaria, a single loaf of bread had to last his
family all week. The hunger and deprivation he experienced during
his early years perhaps explain his fascination with the limits of
physical endurance.All his life, Herzog would embrace risk and
danger, constantly looking for challenges and adventures. Filled to
the brim with memorable stories and poignant observations, Every
Man for Himself and God against All unveils the influences and
ideas that drive his creativity and have shaped his unique view of
the world. This book tells, for the first time, the story of his
extraordinary and fascinating life.
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The Lost Writings (Hardcover)
Franz Kafka; Edited by 'Reiner Stach; Translated by Michael Hofmann
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R441
Discovery Miles 4 410
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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."
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.
'A potent, vaporous fever dream; a meditation on truth, lies,
illusion and time' NEW YORK TIMES In his first novel, the great
filmmaker, Werner Herzog, tells the incredible story of a Japanese
soldier who defended a small island for twenty-nine years after the
end of World War II. Hold the island until the Imperial army's
return. You are to defend its territory by guerrilla tactics, at
all costs... There is only one rule: you are forbidden to die by
your own hand. In the event of your capture by the enemy, you are
to give them all the misleading information you can. In 1944, on
Lubang Island in the Philippines, with Japanese troops about to
withdraw, Lieutenant Hiroo Onoda was given orders by his superior
officer. So began Onoda's long campaign, during which he became
fluent in the hidden language of the jungle. Soon weeks turned into
months, months into years, and years into decades - until
eventually time itself seemed to melt away. All the while Onoda
continued to fight his fictitious war, at once surreal and tragic,
at first with other soldiers, and then, finally, alone, a character
in a novel of his own making. 'Herzog's writing bristles with the
same eerie and uncompromising energy as his films. His jungle
pulses with hallucinatory life' Guardian
First new collection of poems since Approximately Nowhere (1999).
'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.
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.
'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.
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
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.
In his first novel, Werner Herzog tells a hypnotic tale inspired by
the true story of a Japanese soldier who defended a small island
for twenty-nine years after the end of WWII 1944: Lubang Island,
the Philippines. With Japanese troops about to withdraw, Lieutenant
Hiroo Onoda was given orders by his superior officer: Hold the
island until the Imperial army's return. You are to defend its
territory by guerrilla tactics, at all costs. So began Onoda's long
campaign. Soon weeks turned into months, months into years, and
years into decades - until eventually time itself seemed to melt
away. All the while Onoda continued to fight his fictitious war, at
once surreal and tragic, at first with other soldiers, and then,
finally, alone, a character in a novel of his own making. . . 'An
enthralling novel that explores the nature of time and warfare with
great mastery' Mail on Sunday 'Herzog. . .brilliantly blends fact
and fiction in this fever dream of a novel' Daily Mail 'A literary
jewel set to sparkle against the backdrop of his monumental career
in cinema' i
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Blood Brothers (Paperback)
Ernst Haffner; Translated by Michael Hofmann
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R270
R195
Discovery Miles 1 950
Save R75 (28%)
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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Blood Brothers is the only known novel by German social worker and
journalist Ernst Haffner, of whom nearly all traces were lost
during the course of the Second World War. Told in stark, unsparing
detail, Haffner's story delves into the illicit underworld of
Berlin on the eve of Hitler's rise to power, describing how these
blood brothers move from one petty crime to the next, spending
their nights in underground bars and makeshift hostels, struggling
together to survive the harsh realities of gang life, and finding
in one another the legitimacy denied them by society.
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