Download or read book The Selected Stories of Siegfried Lenz written by Siegfried Lenz and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 1989 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Siegfried Lenz is one of Germany's foremost writers, ranking in popularity as well as critical esteem with Gunter Grass and Heinrich Boell. He is considered one of the best short story writers of the post-war generation. These twenty-six stories make up the first comprehensive collection of his short works to appear in English.
Download or read book The German Lesson written by Siegfried Lenz and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2021-03-30 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this quiet and devastating novel about the rise of fascism, Siggi Jepsen, incarcerated as a juvenile delinquent, is assigned to write a routine German lesson on the “The Joys of Duty.” Overfamiliar with these joys, Siggi sets down his life since 1943, a decade earlier, when as a boy he watched his father, a constable, doggedly carry out orders from Berlin to stop a well-known Expressionist artist from painting and to seize all his “degenerate” work. Soon Siggi is stealing the paintings to keep them safe from his father. “I was trying to find out,” Lenz says, “where the joys of duty could lead a people.” Translated from the German by Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins
Download or read book The Turncoat written by Siegfried Lenz and published by Other Press, LLC. This book was released on 2020-10-06 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Never has the aftermath for Germans been better depicted than in Siegfried Lenz’s elegiac, The Turncoat. A newly discovered masterpiece.” —Alex Kershaw, New York Times bestselling author of Avenue of Spies Previously unpublished, this German postwar classic is one of the best books of this major writer, who died in 2014. The last summer before the end of World War II, Walter Proska is posted to a small unit tasked with ensuring the safety of a railway line deep in the forest on the border with Ukraine and Byelorussia. In this swampy region, a handful of men—stunned by the heat, attacked by mosquitoes, and abandoned by their own troops in the face of the resistance—must also submit to the increasingly absurd and inhuman orders of their superior. Time passes, and the soldiers isolate themselves, haunted by madness and the desire for death. An encounter with a young Polish partisan, Wanda, makes Proska further doubt the validity of his oath of allegiance, and he seeks to answer the questions that obsess him: When conscience and duty clash, which is more important? Is it possible to take any action without becoming guilty in some way? And where is Wanda, this woman from the resistance he can’t forget? Written in 1951, The Turncoat is Siegfried Lenz’s second novel. Rejected by his publisher, who thought that the story of a German soldier defecting to the Soviet side would be unwelcome in the context of the Cold War, the manuscript was forgotten for nearly seventy years before being rediscovered after the author’s death. A posthumous triumph.
Download or read book Stella written by Siegfried Lenz and published by Other Press, LLC. This book was released on 2010-08-03 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a small town on the Baltic coast, in a community steeped in maritime industries and local mores, a teenager falls in love with his English professor. Christian looks older than his years, Stella younger than hers. The summer they spend together is filled with boat rides to Bird Island, secret walks on the beach, and furtive glances. The emotions that blossom between Christian and Stella are aflame with passion and innocence, and with an idealistic hope of a future. The two lovers manage to keep their mutual attraction concealed, but as the hot months comes to an end, their meetings become more difficult to conceal. Stella begins at the end, at Stella Petersen’s memorial service, where Christian relives the memories he shared with his first love. There is nothing salacious about their relationship, nor is it just a case of a teenager’s crush on his teacher. Their affair changes both Christian and Stella, allows them to expand their views, and pushes them out of social and familial constraints. Theirs is a tender love story of a time, and yet speaks to any time; it is actually through death that their love is transformed. The sparseness of Siegfried Lenz’s narrative is reminiscent of the existential stringency of Ernest Hemingway. Only a master stylist of his standing could compose such a story that is equally modest and powerful, a work that leaves a lasting authentic impression, and that strives to comply with W.H. Auden’s famous request, “Tell me the truth about love.”
Download or read book Letters to Emil written by Henry Miller and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 1989 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Henry Miller's letters to Emil contain a compelling record of this writer in the making, beginning with his first efforts in 1922, tracing his ten-year struggle to find his own voice, and reaching a climax with the publication of 'Tropic of Cancer' in 1934. This one-sided correspondence was often quarried for publication, and has never appeared in print until now.
Download or read book A Childhood Under Hitler and Stalin written by Michael Wieck and published by Univ of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A bestseller in Germany, Michael Wieck's account of his childhood in Königsberg recalls a German city obliterated by fire-bombing during the Second World War. As the child of a Jewish mother and Gentile father, Wieck was persecuted first as a "certified Jew" by the Nazis, then as a German by the Russian occupiers, including horrific internment in the Rothenstein concentration camp. His emigration to the West in 1948 marked the end of the 408-year history of the Jewish community in Königsberg. From the earliest delights of a childhood filled with music, family, and the smell of pines and the sea, Wieck retraces his life. He tells of his school days and their sudden end, the shock of Kristallnacht, his Aunt Fanny being sent by train to a destination unknown, the chemical factory where Jewish workers gradually disappeared, the bombs falling on Königsberg. The Russian occupation was anything but the expected delivery from the horrors of the war. In the midst of privation, savagery, and death, there were moments of absurdity, and Wieck powerfully depicts them in this unforgettable memoir.
Download or read book The Ecco Book of Christmas Stories written by Alberto Manguel and published by Ecco. This book was released on 2006-10-17 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Christmas is the storytelling time, the beginning of things expected but not yet seen, of tales suspenseful and mysterious, and full of a comfort of sorts. Internationally acclaimed anthologist Alberto Manguel offers an immensely enjoyable collection of twenty-three brilliant stories from across the globe, written under the merry canopy of Christmas. The Ecco Book of Christmas Stories includes tales by the best master storytellers, such as "The Turkey Season" by Alice Munro; "Christmas Is a Sad Season for the Poor" by John Cheever; "Crèche" by Richard Ford; "Horatio's Trick" by Ann Beattie; "Another Christmas" by William Trevor; and "The Leaf-Sweeper" by Muriel Spark. The collection also features voices of writers whose work has seldom or never been translated into English, such as "A Risk for Father Christmas" by Siegfried Lenz and "The Night Before Christmas" by Theodore Odrach. Eminently readable, The Ecco Book of Christmas Stories is a celebration of the most magical of seasons.
Download or read book Training Ground written by Siegfried Lenz and published by . This book was released on 1991 with total page 442 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through the limited viewpoint of the confused and vulnerable Bruno, this novel provides a complex commentary both on the decline of a family and on the wider history of post-war Germany. The author has won a number of literary awards, including the Thomas Mann Prize.
Download or read book The Heritage written by Siegfried Lenz and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 462 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In "The Heritage," first published in German in 1978, Zygmunt Rogalla, an elderly Masurian rug-maker from Lucknow - which was once part of East Prussia, now part of Poland - tells his story from a hospital bed. The curator of the Masurian museum, where objects were collected as a symbol of the culture that had been lost in the second world war and after, he is also its destroyer, his injuries self-inflicted. Through the remembrance of his sufferings, he explains why the museum was so important to him, and to his fellow exiles, and what terrible discovery led him to destroy not only his life's greatest work, but the objects salvaged from his people's lost past.
Download or read book Walk the Blue Fields written by Claire Keegan and published by Open Road + Grove/Atlantic. This book was released on 2016-03-29 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Claire Keegan’s brilliant debut collection, Antarctica, was a Los Angeles Times Book of the Year, and earned her resounding accolades on both sides of the Atlantic. Now she has delivered her next, much-anticipated book, Walk the Blue Fields, an unforgettable array of quietly wrenching stories about despair and desire in the timeless world of modern-day Ireland. In the never-before-published story “The Long and Painful Death,” a writer awarded a stay to work in Heinrich Böll’s old cottage has her peace interrupted by an unwelcome intruder, whose ulterior motives only emerge as the night progresses. In the title story, a priest waits at the altar to perform a marriage and, during the ceremony and the festivities that follow, battles his memories of a love affair with the bride that led him to question all to which he has dedicated his life; later that night, he finds an unlikely answer in the magical healing powers of a seer. A masterful portrait of a country wrestling with its past and of individuals eking out their futures, Walk the Blue Fields is a breathtaking collection from one of Ireland’s greatest talents, and a resounding articulation of all the yearnings of the human heart.
Download or read book The German Lesson written by Siegfried Lenz and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 472 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In writing this novel, one of the major works of German fiction to appear since the Second World War, Siegfried Lenz has written, 'I was trying to find out where the joys of duty could lead a people.' His exploration is a disturbing triumph. Siggi Jepsen, the protagonist, is embroiled in the conflict between the totalitarian Nazi government and a creative artist. As a young boy he watched his father, constable of the northernmost police station in Germany, doggedly carry out orders from Berlin to stop a well-known Expressionist, their neighbour, from painting and to seize all his 'degenerate' work. Soon Siggi is hiding the paintings to keep them safe from his father. Against the great brooding landscape of the Danish borderland, Siggi recounts the clash of father and son, of duty and personal loyalty in wartime Germany. 'The German Lesson has the virtue of being a novel about the War and about persecution which deliberately avoids violence and obvious horrors. To this . . . are added the . . . merits of lucidity, elegance, a brilliant organizing skill.' The Sunday Times 'Visually the wary folk and bitter landscape of the Danish borderland comes over as potently as Grass's East Prussia.' The Guardian 'The timeless conflict . . . ''duty'' versus individual conscience and morality is given bizarre, complex form in Lenz's powerful tale. . . Mordantly witty, despairing, impassioned, this is one of the most deeply imagined and thought-provoking novels from Germany in years.' Library Journal 'The German Lesson marks a double triumph - a book of rare depth and brilliance, to begin with, presented in an English version that succeeds against improbable odds in conveying the full power of the original.' Ernst Pawel, The New York Times Book Review 'The German Lesson is, quite simply, the book I have been waiting ever since the end of World War 11 for a German to write. 'Kaye Boyle 'A remarkable, earnest and important novel. Lenz moves toward realizing new dimensions and perspectives on the German sensibility that must contribute to our eventual understanding of the madness of the times.' Robert K. Morris, The Nation 'If ever the Third Reich was pictured in microcosm, with its prejudices against people not rooted in the land, and its tiny spasms of nationalistic fervour that added up to an irrational howl in final sum, then Lenz has done it . . . has surpassed it.' Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, New York Times
Download or read book Small Things Like These written by Claire Keegan and published by Grove Press. This book was released on 2021-11-30 with total page 79 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize "A hypnotic and electrifying Irish tale that transcends country, transcends time." —Lily King, New York Times bestselling author of Writers & Lovers Small Things Like These is award-winning author Claire Keegan's landmark new novel, a tale of one man's courage and a remarkable portrait of love and family It is 1985 in a small Irish town. During the weeks leading up to Christmas, Bill Furlong, a coal merchant and family man faces into his busiest season. Early one morning, while delivering an order to the local convent, Bill makes a discovery which forces him to confront both his past and the complicit silences of a town controlled by the church. An international bestseller, Small Things Like These is a deeply affecting story of hope, quiet heroism, and empathy from one of our most critically lauded and iconic writers.
Download or read book Restless written by William Boyd and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2012-12-01 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is 1939. Eva Delectorskaya is a beautiful 28-year-old Russian émigrée living in Paris. As war breaks out she is recruited for the British Secret Service by Lucas Romer, a mysterious Englishman, and under his tutelage she learns to become the perfect spy, to mask her emotions and trust no one, including those she loves most. Since the war, Eva has carefully rebuilt her life as a typically English wife and mother. But once a spy, always a spy. Now she must complete one final assignment, and this time Eva can't do it alone: she needs her daughter's help.
Download or read book Motel of the Mysteries written by David Macaulay and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 1979-10-11 with total page 97 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is the year 4022; all of the ancient country of Usa has been buried under many feet of detritus from a catastrophe that occurred back in 1985. Imagine, then, the excitement that Howard Carson, an amateur archeologist at best, experienced when in crossing the perimeter of an abandoned excavation site he felt the ground give way beneath him and found himself at the bottom of a shaft, which, judging from the DO NOT DISTURB sign hanging from an archaic doorknob, was clearly the entrance to a still-sealed burial chamber. Carson's incredible discoveries, including the remains of two bodies, one of then on a ceremonial bed facing an altar that appeared to be a means of communicating with the Gods and the other lying in a porcelain sarcophagus in the Inner Chamber, permitted him to piece together the whole fabric of that extraordinary civilization.
Download or read book Marrow and Bone written by Walter Kempowski and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2020-03-24 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A moving, darkly funny road trip novel about World War II, returning to one's birthplace, and coming to terms with tragedy. West Germany, 1988, just before the fall of the Berlin Wall: Jonathan Fabrizius, a middle-aged erstwhile journalist, has a comfortable existence in Hamburg, bankrolled by his furniture-manufacturing uncle. He lives with his girlfriend Ulla in a grand, decrepit prewar house that just by chance escaped annihilation by the Allied bombers. One day Jonathan receives a package in the mail from the Santubara Company, a luxury car company, commissioning him to travel in their newest V8 model through the People’s Republic of Poland and to write about the route for a car rally. Little does the company know that their choice location is Jonathan’s birthplace, for Jonathan is a war orphan from former East Prussia, whose mother breathed her last fleeing the Russians and whose father, a Nazi soldier, was killed on the Baltic coast. At first Jonathan has no interest in the job, or in dredging up ancient family history, but as his relationship with Ulla starts to wane, the idea of a return to his birthplace, and the money to be made from the gig, becomes more appealing. What follows is a darkly comic road trip, a queasy misadventure of West German tourists in Communist Poland, and a reckoning that is by turns subtle, satiric, and genuine. Marrow and Bone is an uncomfortably funny and revelatory odyssey by one of the most talented and nuanced writers of postwar Germany.
Download or read book Museums of the Mind German Modernity and the Dynamics of Collecting written by and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Rest Is Noise written by Alex Ross and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2007-10-16 with total page 706 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism A New York Times Book Review Top Ten Book of the Year Time magazine Top Ten Nonfiction Book of 2007 Newsweek Favorite Books of 2007 A Washington Post Book World Best Book of 2007 In this sweeping and dramatic narrative, Alex Ross, music critic for The New Yorker, weaves together the histories of the twentieth century and its music, from Vienna before the First World War to Paris in the twenties; from Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia to downtown New York in the sixties and seventies up to the present. Taking readers into the labyrinth of modern style, Ross draws revelatory connections between the century's most influential composers and the wider culture. The Rest Is Noise is an astonishing history of the twentieth century as told through its music.
