When a young reader once asked Franz Fuhmann if he considered his work to be science fiction, he was quick to deny it: he wanted nothing to do with the genre. As he began writing the stories that make up this volume, however, he found himself coming...

Science has given us several explanations for how humans evolved from walking on four limbs to two feet. None, however, is as riveting as what master storyteller Ngugi wa Thiong'o offers in "The Upright Revolution". Blending myth and folklore with an...

The perfect book for paranoid times, "I" introduces us to W, a mere hanger-on in East Berlin's postmodern underground literary scene. All is not as it appears, though, as W is actually a Stasi informant who reports to the mercurial David Bowie look-a...

This novel by esteemed Swiss writer Max Frisch is an exploration of the question: "Why don't we live when we know we're here just this one time, just one single, unrepeatable time in this unutterably magnificent world?!" This outcry against the empti...

"Gone, finito, The End, I say. A father who puts an end to it all before he wears down the whole family deserves more praise than damnation". Two sisters travel to Sofia – in a convoy of luxury limousines arranged by a fellow Bulgarian exile – to...

Christa Wolf was arguably the best-known and most influential writer in the former East Germany. Having grown up during the Nazi regime, she and her family were forced to flee their home like many others, nearly starving to death in the process. Her...

Max Weber famously described politics as "a strong, slow drilling through hard boards with both passion and judgment". Taking this as his inspiration, Alexander Kluge brings readers yet another literary masterpiece. "Drilling through Hard Boards" is...

Almost twenty years after the fall of the wall, the Kreuzberg district of Berlin has become unbearably trendy and deeply unappealing to Alina and Wolf. They move to Muggelsee, at the city's bucolic border, where the differences between East and West...

In a publishing world that is all too full of realist novels written in undistinguished prose, discernible only by their covers, "The Flying Mountain" stands out – if for no other reason than that it consists entirely of blank verse. And that form is...

This collection of four stories by the writer George Steiner called "one of the masters of European fiction" is, as longtime fans of Thomas Bernhard would expect, bleakly comic and inspiringly rancorous. The subject of his stories vary: in one, Goeth...