'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.

'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.

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

'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.

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."

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.

'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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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?

Michael Hofmann, a much-praised contributor to Poetry Introduction 5, was born in Germany in 1957 but brought up in Britain. Nights in the Iron Hotel, which won the author a Cholmondeley Award in 1984, is his first full-length volume. Hofmann's poems are marked by a classical authority, a formidable ironic intelligence, wide-ranging subject matter and a unique tone of voice. 'You move the fifty-seven muscles it takes to smile,' Hofmann writes in a poem whose subject is sexual tension - and immediately the reader recognises a world in which emotions are not the usual poetic counters but something truer, more complex and more painful. This quality of disenchantment is served by a deceptively laconic style of measured brio.

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.