April 2013

  Compiled and translated by Peter Wortsman, this collection of short stories, novellas and literary fragments by German writer Heinrich von Kleist (1777–1811) is impressive not only for its content but for its relevance centuries later. In “The Earthquake in Chile,”

A century ago, a distinguished Austrian scholar observed that Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811) was “the most difficult problem in literary history” and that the more we learned about him, the more of a problem he became. That state of affairs

Poet of Paradox Heinrich von Kleist's dark conjuring yields a strange, enlivening joy Geoffrey O'Brien Apr/May 2010 On the morning of November 21, 1811, Heinrich von Kleist and his terminally ill friend Henriette Vogel strolled to the shore of the Wannsee, near Berlin, and

"The Marquise of O.", one of Heinrich von Kleist's best-known novellas, tells the story of Julietta, a respectable widow, who feels obliged to advertise in the local paper that "she had, unbeknownst to her, been gotten in the family way;

  Roughton's beautiful, poetic translation of Laxness's novel tunes readers in to the frustrated genius of its principal character, far better than that character's own lengthy philosophical discourses do. Shortly after World War I, Steinn, a young Icelandic poet-philosopher, heads abroad

Finally, finally, an imposing work of fiction, which rises like a cliff from the flatness of Icelandic poetry and fiction of recent years!  Iceland has gained a new master novelist, and we are certainly bound to admit that with joy. 

  The Great Weaver from Rekjavic (The treasured “independence” of a small Scandinavian nation became both matrix and subject for one of the twentieth century’s greatest novelists.) Thanks in large part to the championing of his work undertaken by American poet and novelist

The Piranesi “Carceri” etching that provides the cover image for this translation of Gérard de Nerval’s Les Faux Saulniers could scarcely be more appropriate. Not only is it reminiscent of the endless stairways and the central galleries and hidden cells

  George Büchner’s story Lenz, written probably in October 1835 and published in 1839, tow years after its author's early death, has become a totemic work of German literature.  It straddles fiction and documentary by sticking closely to the ascertainable facts concerning

  First published in 1839, Lenz is a novella based on three weeks in the tortured life (1751 to 1792) of the schizophrenic Livonian playwright J.M.R. Lenz. This new translation includes two important additions: a section from the diary of the pastor J.F.