'I've been summoned, Thursday, ten sharp.' So begins one day in the life of a young clothing-factory worker during Ceausescu's totalitarian regime. She has been questioned before, but this time she knows it will be worse. Her crime? Sewing notes into the linings of men's suits bound for Italy. 'Marry me', the notes say, with her name and address. Anything to get out of the country.As she rides the tram to her interrogation, her thoughts stray to her friend Lilli, shot while trying to flee to Hungary; to her grandparents, deported after her first husband informed on them; to Major Albu, her interrogator, who begins each session with a wet kiss on her fingers; and to Paul, her lover and the one person she can trust. In her distraction, she misses her stop and finds herself on an unfamiliar street.And what she discovers there suddenly puts her fear of the appointment into chilling perspective. Bone-spare and intense, The Appointment is a pitiless rendering of the terrors of a crushing regime.

After Midnight the Shark Bites A voice intrudes the darkness spites With every thought death confirming it's there Denied in this moment but a presence now shared In the early morning hours a raw voice woke up inside me At its own pace, and delivering in paired lines, it forced itself onto the page The words it spoke inside my head, as couplets, came alive and danced To a music, only the early morning hours could play

For over forty years Kurt Philip Behm has lived within the magic of the 'Perpetual Present.' It has inspired all of his writing, and has allowed him to both see and write about the truth contained within every moment. Once acknowledging this truth within himself and accepting its presence, he started an inward journey that 'time, ' and its deceptive handmaidens, the 'past' and 'future, ' would have only denied. His message is to live not only for today, but this very moment, knowing that this moment is all that we have, have had, or will ever have again. Living within the magic of its 'Perpetual Present' will then free our souls, guiding us on a path toward becoming all that we were truly meant to b

Award wining author Kurt Philip Behm's third novel, 'Searching For Crazy Horse, ' is the seminal work of a forty-year search for the truth within himself. While touring the Rocky Mountains by motorcycle since 1967, he started to hear a voice from deep inside himself talking to him, and saying things that at first he could not understand. The great Crazy Horse's words were confusing when first spoken, but once heard clearly, they allowed the author to break through his own limitations, and finally set himself free. Ride with them together, as they travel the high mountains along the spine of the 'Great Divide.' You will come away with a better understanding of what it meant to be truly free, in a time when the American landscape was big enough to hold all of one's imagination within its heart. And where the true magic within a dream, was in dreaming it together.

For over forty years Kurt Philip Behm has lived within the magic of the 'Perpetual Present.' It has inspired all of his writing, and has allowed him to both see and write about the truth contained within every moment. Once acknowledging this truth within himself and accepting its presence, he started an inward journey that 'time, ' and its deceptive handmaidens, the 'past' and 'future, ' would have only denied. His message is to live not only for today, but this very moment, knowing that this moment is all that we have, have had, or will ever have again. Living within the magic of its 'Perpetual Present' will then free our souls, guiding us on a path toward becoming all that we were truly meant to b

Kurt Behm was a typical, middle class baby-boomer kid growing up in the 1950s. While playing badminton with his Sister in the back yard, he tried to retrieve a shuttlecock (birdie) that got stuck up in one of the pine trees which separated the woods from his backyard. His Mothers aluminum clothespole was his weapon of choice. Again and again he threw it up into the tree with no success, until all at once it looked like the 4th of July. Fire and sparks were everywhere. The aluminum clothes pole had threaded itself between the electrical wires that ran hidden through the trees. It was now acting as a conductor between all three wires, creating an effect his father later compared to Guadalcanal. The ensuing fire burned the woods completely to the ground. A year later and amidst the charred remains, his township had the foresight and the vision to turn that rubble into what every red-blodded boy of that era dreamed of having for himself ............. a Playground. Kurt's life from then on would never be the same

Romania, the last months of the dictator's regime. Adina is a young schoolteacher. Paul is a musician. Clara, Adina's friend, works in a wire factory. Pavel is Clara's lover. But one of them works for the secret police and is reporting on the group. One day Adina returns home to discover that her fox fur rug has had its tail cut off. On another day, a hindleg. Then a foreleg. The mutilation is a sign that she is being tracked - the fox was ever the hunter. Images of photographic precision combine to form a kaleidoscope of reflections, deflections and deceit. Adina and her friends struggle to keep living in a world permeated with fear, where even the eyes of a cat seem complicit with the watchful eye of the state, and where it's hard to tell the victim apart from the perpetrator.

For My Children And Grandchildren This book is dedicated to my wonderful children and grandchildren, and of course to any new and special additions that may still come our way. I hope through these stories, my grandchildren will be able to share in the magic of their parent's childhood, in the same way that their parent's are now sharing in theirs. And in the most special way, it is dedicated to Sammy and Bumpers. Two incredible little squirrels that made the stories in this book come to life. It was the magical adventures that Scooter and Buzzy Bear had with Sammy and Bumpers that made these stories possible. I was lucky enough to have witnessed all that follows.

A brilliant new translation of Koestler's long-lost original manuscript. A chilling and unforgettable 20th century classic. From a prison cell in an unnamed country run by a totalitarian government Rubashov reflects. Once a powerful player in the regime, mercilessly dispensing with anyone who got in the way of his party's aims, Rubashov has had the tables turned on him. He has been arrested and he'll be interrogated, probably tortured and certainly executed. Darkness at Noon is as gripping as a thriller and a seminal work of twentieth-century literature. Published in Great Britain in 1940, it was feted by George Orwell, went on to be translated into thirty languages and is considered the finest work of pre-eminent European master, Arthur Koestler. And yet the novel's worldwide reputation has, for over seventy years, been based on the first incomplete and inexpert English translation - Koestler's original manuscript was lost when he fled the German occupation of Paris in 1940. In 2016, a student discovered that long-lost manuscript in a Zurich archive. At last, with the publication of this new translation of the rediscovered original, Koestler's masterpiece can be experienced afresh and in its entirety for the first time. THE NEW TRANSLATION BY PHILIP BOEHM

Salim the coachman tells enchanting tales, but suddenly he is struck dumb. Just as Scheherazade told tales to save her life, Salim's friends must spin yarns to save his speech. Set in Damascus in 1959, the novel alternates the real lives of our storytellers with stories from the distant past. These are neither fables nor fairy tales with everlasting, happy endings, and they often require readers to suspend their disbelief. Each chapter is preceded by a one-line hint of what is to come, such as 'How one person's true story was not believed, whereas his most blatant lie was.'

Winner of the 2020 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translation Prize The Fox and Dr. Shimamura toothsomely encompasses East and West, memory and reality, fox-possession myths, and psychiatric mythmaking. As an outstanding young Japanese medical student at the end of the nineteenth century, Dr. Shimamura is sent-to his dismay-to the provinces: he is asked to cure scores of young women afflicted by an epidemic of fox possession. Believing it's all a hoax, he considers the assignment an insulting joke, until he sees a fox moving under the skin of a young beauty... Next he travels to Europe and works with such luminaries as Charcot, Breuer and Freud-whose methods, Dr. Shimamura concludes, are incompatible with Japanese politeness. The ironic parallels between Charcot's theories of female hysteria and ancient Japanese fox myths-when it comes to beautiful, writhing young women-are handled with a lightly sardonic touch by Christine Wunnicke, whose flavor-packed, inventive language is a delight.

In Malina, originally published in German in 1971, Ingeborg Bachmann invites the reader into a world stretched to the very limits of language. An unnamed narrator, a writer in Vienna, is torn between two men: viewed, through the tilting prism of obsession, she travels further into her own madness, anxiety, and genius. Malina explores love, "deathstyles," the roots of fascism, and passion.

A "New York Times Book Review "Editors' Choice
For eight weeks in 1945, as Berlin fell to the Russian army, a young woman kept a daily record of life in her apartment building and among its residents. "With bald honesty and brutal lyricism" ("Elle"), the anonymous author depicts her fellow Berliners in all their humanity, as well as their cravenness, corrupted first by hunger and then by the Russians. "Spare and unpredictable, minutely observed and utterly free of self-pity" ("The Plain Dealer, " Cleveland), "A Woman in Berlin" tells of the complex relationship between civilians and an occupying army and the shameful indignities to which women in a conquered city are always subject--the mass rape suffered by all, regardless of age or infirmity.
"A Woman in Berlin" stands as "one of the essential books for understanding war and life" (A. S. Byatt, author of "Possession").