Franz Kafka's enigmatic, deadpan, and deeply pessimistic stories are central to literary modernism. In 'The Metamorphosis', the estrangement of everyday life becomes corporealized when Gregor Samsa wakes up as a giant bug and wonders how he is going to ge
A combination of two of Musil's books: Drei Frauen (1924) (Three Women – a collection of three short stories) and Vereinigungen (1911) (Unions – a collection of two short stories).The recent translations of The Man Without Qualities and Musil's Diarie
Siggi Jepsen, incarcerated as a juvenile delinquent, is one day 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 fa
With his epic trilogy, The Sleepwalkers, Hermann Broch established himself as one of the great innovators of modern literature, a visionary writer-philosopher the equal of James Joyce, Thomas Mann, or Robert Musil. Even as he grounded his narratives in th
The second part of Hermann Broch's Sleepwalkers trilogy - the comic but horrifying story of Esch and his troupe of female wrestlers. The novel is a dark satire on Germany on the eve of World War I.
From late 1917 until June 1919, Franz Kafka ceased to keep a diary, for which he had used quarto-size notebooks, instead writing in a series of smaller, octavo-size notebooks. When Kafka's literary executor, Max Brod, published the diaries in 1948, he omi
Tells the story of lives painfully intertwined: the unnamed narrator, haunted by nightmarish memories of her father, lives with the androgynous Malina, an initially remote and dispassionate man who ultimately becomes an ominous influence. Plunging toward
