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Requiem for Ernst Jandl
A lyrical requiem for Mayröcker's late partner, the writer Ernst Jandl. Austrian poet and playwright Ernst Jandl died in 2000, leaving behind his partner, poet Friederike Mayröcker--and bringing to an end a half century of shared life, and shared literary work. Mayröcker immediately began attempting to come to terms with his death in the way that poets struggling with loss have done for millennia: by writing. Requiem for Ernst Jandl is the powerfully moving outcome. In this quiet but passionate lament that grows into a song of enthralling intensity, Mayröcker recalls memories and shared experiences, and--with the sudden, piercing perception of regrets that often accompany grief--reads Jandl's works in a new light. Alarmed by a sudden, existential emptiness, she reflects on the future, and the possibility of going on with her life and work in the absence of the person who, as we see in this elegy, was a constant conversational and creative partner.
In Field Latin
Life lived within a field of language, walks forever through a landscape's legends. Lutz Seiler grew up in the former German Democratic Republic and has long lived outside of Berlin. His poems arrive from the borders, the in-betweens, and the provinces, and it is precisely this literal and metaphorical soil which lies beneath, indeed nourishes, every one of Mr. Seiler's poems, poems marked by whispers, weather, time's relentless passing, ghosts, and the dead. With an incomparable sense of stillness, quiet, and love, Mr Seiler walks with the reader through the place of which he is part and, contrary to contemporary demands, with no hurry and with great attention to its particulars. In calling forth his landscape's life, in full awareness of both his literary and non-literary forebears, Lutz Seiler has re-contextualized and radically personalized German Naturlyrik for the 21st century while simultaneously reestablishing the insoluble bond between poet and landscape.
Correspondence
Paul Celan (1920-70) is one of the best-known German poets of the Holocaust; many of his poems, admired for their spare, precise diction, deal directly with its stark themes. Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-73) is recognized as one of post-World War II German literature's most important novelists, poets, and playwrights. It seems only appropriate that these two contemporaries and masters of language were at one time lovers, and they shared a lengthy, artful, and passionate correspondence. Collected here for the first time in English are their letters written between 1948 and 1961. Their correspondence forms a moving testimony of the discourse of love in the age after Auschwitz, with ...
Bad Words
"I now no longer use the better words." Ilse Aichinger (1921-2016) was one of the most important writers of postwar Austrian and German literature. Born in 1921 to a Jewish mother, she survived World War II in Vienna, while her twin sister Helga escaped with one of the last Kindertransporte to England in 1938. Many of their relatives were deported and murdered. Those losses make themselves felt throughout Aichinger's writing, which since her first and only novel, The Greater Hope, in 1948, has highlighted displacement, estrangement, and a sharp skepticism toward language. By 1976, when she published Bad Words in German, her writing had become powerfully poetic, dense, and experimental. This volume presents the whole of the original Bad Words in English for the first time, along with a selection of Aichinger's other short stories of the period; together, they demonstrate her courageous effort to create and deploy a language unmarred by misleading certainties, preconceived rules, or implicit ideologies.
December
In the historic tradition of calendar stories and calendar illustrations, author and film director Alexander Kluge and celebrated visual artist Gerhard Richter have composed December, a collection of thirty-nine stories and thirty-nine snow-swept photographs for the darkest month of the year. In stories drawn from modern history and the contemporary moment, from mythology, and even from meteorology, Kluge toys as readily with time and space as he does with his characters. In the narrative entry for December 1931, Adolf Hitler avoids a car crash by inches. In another, we relive Greek financial crises. There are stories where time accelerates, and others in which it seems to slow to the pace o...
The Labyrinth of Tender Force
No human quality is more necessary for survival than love. But while love has the power to lift us up with boundless joy, it has equal strength to crush us--it is easy to lose your way within love's complex labyrinth of oppositions. The Labyrinth of Tender Force collects 166 of Alexander Kluge's love stories previously concealed among his vast library of more than 2,000 texts. "Basic stories" was what he once called them. Organized thematically, these stories take readers on a flight over the maps--the varied topography--of love. This flight ends on a high plateau, at the heart of the most beautiful romances and a cardinal text of modernity about the economy of relationships: Madame de La Fayette's The Princess of Cleves. The latest offering from one of the greatest living German writers, The Labyrinth of Tender Force masterfully explores the greatest peaks and the most dreadful crevasses of passionate love through an inspired combination of Kluge's vignettes with drawings, photographs, and other archival material culled from diverse sources.
At the Burning Abyss
Franz Fühmann's magnum opus. At the Burning Abyss is a gripping and profoundly personal encounter with the great expressionist poet Georg Trakl. It is a taking stock of two troubled lives, a turbulent century, and the liberating power of poetry. Picking up where his last book, The Jew Car, left off, Fühmann probes his own susceptibility to ideology's seductions--Nazism, then socialism--and examines their antidote, the goad of Trakl's enigmatic verses. He confronts Trakl's "unlivable life," as his poetry transcends the panaceas of black-and-white ideology, ultimately bringing a painful, necessary understanding of "the whole human being: in victories and triumphs as in distress and defeat, in temptation and obsession, in splendor and in ordure." In 1982, the German edition of At the Burning Abyss won the West German Scholl Siblings Prize, celebrating its "courage to resist inhumanity." At a time of political extremism and polarization, has lost none of its urgency.
Thick of It
The poems of Ulrike Almut Sandig are at once simple and fantastic. This new collection finds her on her way to imaginary territories. Thick of It charts a journey through two hemispheres to "the center of the world" and navigates a "thicket" that is at once the world, the psyche, and language itself. The poems explore an urgently urban reality, but that reality is interwoven with references to nightmares, the Bible, fairy tales, and nursery rhymes--all overlaid with a finely tuned longing for a disappearing world. The old names are forgotten, identities fall away; things disappear from the kitchen; everything is sliding away. Powerful themes emerge, but always mapped onto the local, the fractured individual in "the thick of it" all. This is language at its most crafted and transformative, blisteringly contemporary, but with a kind of austerity, too. By turns comic, ironic, skeptical, nostalgic, these poems are also profoundly musical, exploiting multiple meanings and stretching syntax, so that the audience is constantly kept guessing, surprised by the next turn in the line.
World-Changing Rage
An exploration by an artist and writer duo of a fundamental constant in the history of humankind: rage, and its impact on the world. Rage and obstinacy are close relatives--and fundamental categories in the work of both Georg Baselitz and Alexander Kluge. In World-Changing Rage, these two accomplished German creators explore links and fractures between two cultures through two media: ink and watercolor on paper, and the written word. The long history of humankind is also a history of rage, fury, and wrath. In this book, Baselitz and Kluge explore the dynamism of rage and its potential to rapidly grow and erupt into blazing protests, revolution, and war. The authors also reflect the melanchol...
War Diary
Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-73) is recognized as one of the most important novelists, poets, and playwrights of postwar German literature. As befitting such a versatile writer, her War Diary is not a day-by-day journal but a series of sketches, depicting the last months of World War II and the first year of the subsequent British occupation of Austria. These articulate and powerful entries--all the more remarkable taking into account Bachmann's young age at the time--reveal the eighteen-year-old's hatred of both war and Nazism as she avoids the fanatics' determination to "defend Klagenfurt to the last man and the last woman." The British occupation leads to her incredible meeting...
