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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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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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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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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.
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.
'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.
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 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.
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.
First new collection of poems since Approximately Nowhere (1999).
'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
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.
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Kairos (Hardcover)
Jenny Erpenbeck; Translated by Michael Hofmann
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R691
R556
Discovery Miles 5 560
Save R135 (20%)
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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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. As the Times Literary
Supplement writes: "The weight of history, the particular
experiences of East and West, and the ways in which cultural and
subjective memory shape individual identity has always been present
in Erpenbeck's work. She knows that no one is all bad, no state all
rotten, and she masterfully captures the existential bewilderment
of this period between states and ideologies." In the opinion of
her superbly gifted translator Michael Hofmann, Kairos is the great
post-Unification novel. And, as The New Republic has commented on
his work as a translator: "Hofmann's translation is invaluable-it
achieves what translations are supposedly unable to do: it is at
once 'loyal' and 'beautiful.'"
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The Lost Writings (Hardcover)
Franz Kafka; Edited by 'Reiner Stach; Translated by Michael Hofmann
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R491
R403
Discovery Miles 4 030
Save R88 (18%)
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Ships in 10 - 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."
'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 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.
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
Michael Hofmann is renowned as one of our most brilliant critics
and translators; that he is also regarded as among our most
respected poets - 'one of the definitive bodies of work of the last
half-century', TLS - is all the more impressive for his relatively
concentrated output. One Lark, One Horse will be his fifth
collection of poems since his debut in 1983, and his first since
Approximately Nowhere in 1999. But it is also one of the most
anticipated gatherings of new work in years. In style, it is as
unmistakable as ever: sometimes funny, sometimes caustic;
world-facing and yet intimate; and shows a bright mind burning
fiercely over the European imagination. Approaching his sixtieth
birthday, the poet explores where he finds himself, geographically
and in life, treating with wit and compassion such universal themes
as ageing and memory, place, and the difficulty for the individual
to exist at all in an ever bigger and more bestial world. One Lark,
One Horse is a remarkable assembly of work that will delight loyal
readers and enchant new ones with its approachable, companionable
voice.
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