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Showing 1 - 25 of
29 matches in All Departments
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Star 111
Lutz Seiler; Translated by Tess Lewis
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R527
R429
Discovery Miles 4 290
Save R98 (19%)
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Ships in 9 - 15 working days
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Winner of the 2020 Leipzig Book Fair Prize Longlisted for the 2022
Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger Shortlisted for the 2022 Prix
Femina étranger #1 on the Spiegel Bestseller List November 1989.
The Berlin Wall has just fallen when the East German couple Inge
und Walter, following a secret dream they've harboured all their
lives, set out for life in the West. Carl, their son, refuses to
keep watch over the family home and instead heads to Berlin, where
he lives in his father's car until he is taken in by a group of
squatters. Led by a shepherd and his goat, the pack of squatters
sets up the first alternative bar in East Berlin and are involved
in guerrilla occupations. And it's with them that Carl, trained as
a bricklayer, finds himself an initiate of anarchy, of love, and
above all of poetry. Winner of the prestigious Leipzig Book Fair
Prize and a bestseller in German already with 150,000 copies sold,
Star 111, musical and incantatory, tells of the search for
authentic existence and also of a family exploded by political
change which must find its way back together.
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Kruso (Paperback)
Lutz Seiler; Translated by Tess Lewis
1
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R412
R338
Discovery Miles 3 380
Save R74 (18%)
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Ships in 9 - 15 working days
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Winner of the German Book Prize. It is 1989, and a young literature
student named Ed travels to the Baltic island of Hiddensee, a
notorious destination for hippies, idealists, and those at odds
with the East German state. On Hiddensee, Ed joins the community of
seasonal workers, led by the charismatic, enigmatic Kruso. At
night, they secretly help the refugees who have come to the island
seeking passage to the West. But Kruso is preoccupied by another
kind of freedom - freedom of the mind. As the wave of history
washes over the German Democratic Republic, the friends' grip on
reality loosens and life on the island will never be the same.
With subtle, bemused humor and an unerring eye for human frailty,
Michel Layaz is known for his tender writing about the hidden
tensions within families, the awkwardness of adolescence, and the
drama of intimacy between friends and lovers. His fifth novel, My
Mother's Tears, is his most poignant yet. The adult narrator of My
Mother's Tears has returned to clean out his childhood home after
his mother's death. In thirty short chapters, each focused on a
talismanic object or resonant episode from his childhood, the
narrator tries to solve the mystery behind the flood of tears with
which his strikingly beautiful, intelligent, and inscrutable mother
greeted his birth. Like insects preserved in amber, these
objects--an artificial orchid, a statue, a pair of green pumps, a
steak knife, a fishing rod and reel, among others--are surrounded
by an aura that permeates the narrator's life. Interspersed with
these chapters are fragments from the narrator's conversation with
his present lover, a woman who demands that he verbally confront
his past. This difficult conversation charts his gradual liberation
from the psychological wounds he suffered growing up. Not only an
account of a son's attempt to understand his enigmatic mother, My
Mother's Tears is also a moving novel about language and memory
that explores the ambivalent power of words to hurt and to heal, to
revive the past and to put childhood demons to rest.
When Kurt Weber inherits his great-uncle's lakeside house, he finds
traces of the dark secrets of his family's past. The early
inhabitants of the house haunt his dreams nightly. And one day a
ghostlike woman appears before him, hiding herself in a room that
had been kept locked throughout his childhood. Inside, Kurt finds a
hidden stash of photographs, letters, and documents. As he
deciphers them, he gradually understands the degree of complicity
in wartime horrors by his family and among his neighbors. As the
story unfolds, it becomes clear that the entire village adheres to
an old and widely understood agreement not to expose the many
members in the community who had been involved with a nearby prison
camp during World War II. This knowledge wraps the entire
community-those involved, and those who know of the involvement-in
inescapable guilt for generations. Translated from the original
German by Tess Lewis, Ludwig's Room is a story of love, betrayal,
honor, and cowardice, as well as the burden of history and the
moral demands of the present.
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Distant Transit (Paperback)
Maja Haderlap; Illustrated by Tess Lewis
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R449
R361
Discovery Miles 3 610
Save R88 (20%)
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Ships in 9 - 15 working days
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Panopticon (Hardcover)
Hans Magnus Enzensberger; Translated by Tess Lewis
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R585
R543
Discovery Miles 5 430
Save R42 (7%)
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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Hans Magnus Enzensberger takes the title for this collection of
daring short essays on topical themes politics, economics,
religion, society not from Jeremy Bentham's famous prison but from
a mid-1930s Cabinet of Curiosities opened in Germany by Karl
Valentin. "There," writes Enzensberger, "viewers could admire,
along with implements of torture, all manner of abnormalities and
sensational inventions." And that's what he offers here: a
wide-ranging, surprising look at all manner of strange aspects of
our contemporary world. As masterly with the essay as he is with
fiction and poetry, Enzensberger here presents complicated thoughts
with a light touch, tying new iterations of old ideas to their
antecedents, quoting liberally from his forebears, and presenting
himself unapologetically as not an expert but a seeker.
Enzensberger the essayist works in the mode of Montaigne, unafraid
to take his reader in unexpected directions, knowing that the
process of exploration is often in itself sufficient reward for
following a line of thought. ?In an era that regularly laments the
death of the public intellectual, Enzensberger is the real deal: a
towering figure in German literature who refuses to let his mind or
work be bound by the narrow world of the poetry or fiction section.
Panopticon will thrill readers daring enough to accompany him.
Writers' notebooks sometimes prove more revelatory than diaries or
intimate journals. At first they might appear to be rag-and-bone
shops of ideas, insights, hesitations, doubts, and records of
things seen, heard, read, dreamt. But eventually they coalesce into
a labyrinthine map of the creative process. Swiss poet Philippe
Jaccottet has faithfully kept notebooks for many decades, and the
selections that make up the Seedtime volumes have retained a
vividness of insight and discovery despite the passage of time.
After all, as the poet himself says, his notebooks are "a
collection of delicate seeds with which I try to replant my
'spiritual forest.'" Seedtime III, which brings this series to a
close, records numerous fleeting thoughts, ephemeral experiences,
and philosophical observations from a renowned poet well into his
seventies, charting the single steps-sometimes forwards, sometimes
back-taken in a lifelong attempt to transcend the limits of art.
The inconclusive nature of the notebook entries, their
tentativeness and lack of resolution, renders them as intriguing
and evocative as some of Jaccottet's best works. In them readers
will find a life full of the kind of contemplation that attracts
yet eludes most of us in our daily existence.
A brilliant collection of micro-fiction, reflecting our fragmented
times. With quirky humor and wry insight, Swiss author Judith
Keller's micro-fictions unravel the fabric of daily life. She
delves into the aporia of language by taking idiomatic expressions
literally, unpacking the multiple meanings of words, and
confounding expectations. Seven Zurich tram stops provide the
framework for these familiar yet absurd portraits of passers-by,
fellow passengers on the tram, the unemployed and the overemployed,
the innocent and the suspicious, young mothers and confused
elderly. The reader is taken on a journey through the city and
offered glimpses of people going more or less successfully about
their lives. These deceptively banal glimpses, however, show us
more than we expect-they turn the lens back on us, puncture our
complacency and ask, "Who are you to judge?" The characters are
hapless and far-fetched, trying to find their footing on shifting
ground and grateful for what happiness they can find. In just a
sentence or two, Keller unlocks metaphysical trapdoors. The
Questionable Ones offers a collection of snapshots that reveal the
extraordinary lurking inside the ordinary and the ordinary at the
core of the extraordinary.
Klaus Merz is one of the most prominent, prolific, and versatile
Swiss writers working today. Celebrated as a master of concise,
condensed sentences, Merz brings depth and resonance to spare
narratives with lyrical prose and striking images. Stigmata of
Bliss brings together three of Merz's critically acclaimed
novellas, offering English readers the perfect introduction to his
work. Jacob Asleep introduces a family marked by illness,
eccentricity, and a child's death. In A Man's Fate, a moment of
inattention on a mountainous hike upends a teacher's life and his
understanding of mortality. And finally, The Argentine traces the
fluctuations of memory and desire in a man's journey around the
world. In each novella, Merz takes readers on a profound and
intimate journey. Read as a whole, the works complement, enrich,
and echo each other.
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Some Heads (Hardcover)
Max Neumann, Hubertus Von Amelunxen, Tess Lewis
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R750
R607
Discovery Miles 6 070
Save R143 (19%)
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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A beautifully produced volume featuring the work of a major German
artist. While a face may be considered a head, a head does not
necessarily carry a face. Between 2015 and 2017, German artist Max
Neuman, known for painting anonymous figures, drew a series of
heads. Each head is a moment, each facing the viewer as if looking
into a crowd, each distinguishable from the other. Who are they?
May we call them portraits? Do they look back? Do they resemble
spirits? Some Heads reproduces these haunting drawings along with
an essay by cultural theorist and curator Hubertus von Amelunxen
that questions the heads and faces while dwelling upon the
effacement of individuality.
“I think in pictures. Poems help me with this. They are like
buoys in the sea. I swim to them, from one to the other. In
between, without them, I am lost. They are the handholds where
something masses together in the infinite expanse.”—Anselm
Kiefer The only visual artist to have won the Peace Prize of the
German Book Trade, Anselm Kiefer is a profoundly literary painter.
In the ten conversations with the writer and theologian Klaus
Dermutz collected here, Kiefer returns to the essential elements of
his art, his aesthetics, and his creative processes. Kiefer
describes how the central materials of his art—lead, sand, water,
fire, ashes, plants, clothing, oil paint, watercolor, and
ink—influence the act of creation. No less decisive are his
intellectual and artistic touchstones: the sixteenth-century Jewish
mystic Isaac Luria, the German Romantic poet Novalis, Ingeborg
Bachmann, Paul Celan, Martin Heidegger, Marcel Proust, Adalbert
Stifter, the operas of Richard Wagner, the Catholic liturgy, and
the innovative theater director and artist Tadeusz Kantor. Kiefer
and Dermutz discuss all of these influential thinkers, as well as
Kiefer’s own status as a controversial figure. His relentless
examination of German history, the themes of guilt, suffering,
communal memory, and the seductions of destruction have earned him
equal amounts of criticism and praise. The conversations in this
book offer a rare insight into the mind of a gifted creator,
appealing to artists, critics, art historians, cultural
journalists, and anyone interested in the visual arts and the
literature and history of the twentieth century.
Klaus Merz is one of the most prominent, prolific, and versatile
Swiss writers working today. Celebrated as a master of concise,
condensed sentences, Merz brings depth and resonance to spare
narratives with lyrical prose and striking images. Stigmata of
Bliss brings together three of Merz's critically acclaimed
novellas, offering English readers the perfect introduction to his
work.Jacob Asleep introduces a family marked by illness,
eccentricity, and a child's death. In A Man's Fate, a moment of
inattention on a mountainous hike upends a teacher's life and his
understanding of mortality. And finally, The Argentine traces the
fluctuations of memory and desire in a man's journey around the
world. In each novella, Merz takes readers on a profound and
intimate journey. Read as a whole, the works complement, enrich,
and echo each other.
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Panopticon (Paperback)
Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Tess Lewis
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R319
Discovery Miles 3 190
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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A collection of daring short essays on topical themes, including
politics, economics, religion, society. Hans Magnus Enzensberger
takes the title for this collection not from Jeremy Bentham's
famous prison but from a mid-1930s Cabinet of Curiosities opened in
Germany by Karl Valentin. "There," writes Enzensberger, "viewers
could admire, along with implements of torture, all manner of
abnormalities and sensational inventions." And that's what he
offers here: a wide-ranging, surprising look at all manner of
strange aspects of our contemporary world. As masterly with the
essay as he is with fiction and poetry, Enzensberger here presents
complicated thoughts with a light touch, tying new iterations of
old ideas to their antecedents, quoting liberally from his
forebears, and presenting himself unapologetically as not an expert
but a seeker. Enzensberger the essayist works in the mode of
Montaigne, unafraid to take his reader in unexpected directions,
knowing that the process of exploration is often in itself
sufficient reward for following a line of thought. In an era that
regularly laments the death of the public intellectual,
Enzensberger is the real deal: a towering figure in German
literature who refuses to let his mind or work be bound by the
narrow world of the poetry or fiction section.
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Incest (Paperback)
Christine Angot; Translated by Tess Lewis
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R325
Discovery Miles 3 250
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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Kruso (Hardcover)
Lutz Seiler; Translated by Tess Lewis
1
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R558
R465
Discovery Miles 4 650
Save R93 (17%)
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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The lyrical, bestselling 2014 German Book Prize winner. It is 1989,
and a young literature student named Ed, fleeing unspeakable
tragedy, travels to the Baltic island of Hiddensee. Long shrouded
in myth, the island is a notorious destination for hippies,
idealists, and those at odds with the East German state. On the
island, Ed stumbles upon the Klausner, Hiddensee's most popular
restaurant, and ends up washing dishes there, despite his lack of
papers. Although he is keen to remain on the sidelines, Ed feels
drawn towards the charismatic Kruso, unofficial leader of the
seasonal workers. Everyone dances to Kruso's tune. He is on a
mission - but to what end, and at what cost? Ed finds himself drawn
ever deeper into the island's rituals, and ever more in need of
Kruso's acceptance and affection. As the wave of history washes
over the German Democratic Republic, the friends' grip on reality
loosens and life on the island will never be the same. PRAISE FOR
LUTZ SEILER 'An enigmatic Bildungsroman, adapting the literary
trope of the island refuge to the dying days of East German
socialism ... English readers can delight in this prizewinning
translation from Tess Lewis, which renders Seiler's vision in prose
of startling clarity.' The Saturday Age 'Kruso [is] the first
worthy successor to Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain to appear in
contemporary German literature.' Der Spiegel
Since his first collection of poetry appeared in 1953, Philippe
Jaccottet has sought to express the ineffable that lies at the
heart of our material world in his essential, elemental poetry. As
one of Switzerland's most prominent and prolific men of letters,
Jaccottet has published more than a dozen books of poetry and
criticism. One of Europe's finest contemporary poets, Jaccottet is
a writer of exacting attention. Through keen observations of the
natural world, of art, literature, music, and reflections on the
human condition, Jaccottet opens his readers' eyes to the
transcendent in everyday life. The Second Seedtime is a collection
of "things seen, things read, and things dreamed." The volume
continues the project Jaccottet began three decades earlier in his
first volume of notebooks, Seedtime. Here, again, he gathers
flashes of beauty dispersed around him like seeds that may blossom
into poems or moments of inspiration. He returns, insistently, to
such literary touchstones as Dante, Montaigne, Gongora, Goethe,
Kierkegaard, Holderlin, Michaux, Hopkins, Bronte, and Dickinson, as
well as musical greats including Bach, Monteverdi, Purcell, and
Schubert. The Second Seedtime is the vivid chronicle of one man's
passionate engagement with the life of the mind, the spirit, and
the natural world.
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Maybe This Time (Paperback)
Alois Hotschnig; Translated by Tess Lewis
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R276
R225
Discovery Miles 2 250
Save R51 (18%)
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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A spellbinding short story collection by one of Austria's most
critically acclaimed authors. A man becomes obsessed with observing
his neighbours. A large family gathers for Christmas only to wait
for the one member who never turns up. An old woman lures a man
into her house where he finds dolls resembling himself as a boy.
Mesmerizing and haunting stories about loss of identity in the
modern world. ------- Why Peirene chose to publish this book: 'I
love Kafka and here we have a Kafkaesque sense of alienation - not
to mention narrative experiments galore! Outwardly normal events
slip into drama before they tip into horror. These oblique tales
exert a fascinating hold over the reader.' Meike Ziervogel,
Publisher
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Angel Of Oblivion (Paperback)
Maja Haderlap; Translated by Tess Lewis
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R466
R380
Discovery Miles 3 800
Save R86 (18%)
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Ships in 9 - 15 working days
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Could you put your beliefs before your family? Epic Annette is the
extraordinary true story of Annette Beaumanoir: brilliant and
fierce, she was a medical student living in a world at war who, at
nineteen years old, joined the French Resistance and saved the
lives of two Jewish children in Paris on the eve of their
deportation to the camps. As a doctor and mother devoted to justice
and equality, Annette was later found guilty of treachery for
supporting the Algerian FLN in France and sentenced to ten years in
prison. The story of her dramatic escape, trial in absentia and
decades in exile, separated from her children, resembles that of
the great heroes whose love for individuals had to compete with
their destiny and love of humanity. Annette will remain with you
forever. With this gripping personal tale of heroism and grief,
author Anne Weber joins Homer in her ability to conjure a titan in
an epic poem.
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Privy Portrait (Paperback)
Jean-Luc Benoziglio; Translated by Tess Lewis
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R376
R244
Discovery Miles 2 440
Save R132 (35%)
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Ships in 9 - 15 working days
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The narrator in Jean-Luc Benoziglio's Privy Portrait has fallen on
hard times. His wife and young daughter have abandoned him, he has
no work or prospects, he's blind in one eye, and he must move into
a horribly tiny apartment with his only possession: a
twenty-five-volume encyclopedia. His neighbors, the Shritzkys, are
vulgar, narrow-minded, and racist. And because he has no space for
his encyclopedia in his cramped room, he stores it in the communal
bathroom, and this becomes a major point of contention with his
neighbors. The bathroom is also the only place he can find refuge
from the Shritzkys' blaring television, and he barricades himself
in it to read his encyclopedia, much to the chagrin of the rest of
the residents of the building. Darkly amusing, Privy Portrait is
the monologue of a man, disoriented by the gaping void of not
knowing his own nationality, recounting the final remnants of his
own sanity and his life. In this buffoonish, even grotesque, yet
deeply pitiful man, Benoziglio explores, with a light yet profound
touch, weighty themes such as the roles of family, history, one's
moral responsibility towards others, and the fragility of personal
identity.
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Obscurity (Paperback)
Philippe Jaccottet, Tess Lewis
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R259
Discovery Miles 2 590
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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The story of an intense encounter between two men who were once
very close and now must grapple with the fractured ideals that
separate them. After several years abroad, a young man returns to
his hometown to seek the man he calls master. This master, a
brilliant philosopher, had made the young man into a disciple
before sending him out into the world to put his teachings into
practice. Returning three years later, the disciple finds his
master has abandoned his wife and child and moved into a squalid
one-room flat, cutting himself off completely from his former life.
Disillusioned and reeling from the discovery, the young man spends
an entire night listening to his master's bitter denunciation of
the ideals they once shared. Written in 1960 during Jaccottet's
period of poetic paralysis, the novel seeks to harmonize the best
and worst of human nature-reconciling despair, falsehood, and
lethargy of spirit with the need to remain open to beauty, truth,
and the essential goodness of humankind. Translated by Tess Lewis,
Obscurity is Jaccottet's only work of fiction, one that will
introduce new readers to the multifaceted skills of this major
poet.
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R398
R330
Discovery Miles 3 300
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