Modern German Writers for English Readers
Discover the best modern German writers for English readers, from Thomas Bernhard and W.G. Sebald to Robert Walser. Explore essential fiction like Austerlitz, The Loser, and Jakob von Gunten in this curated literary guide.
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Jakob von Gunten
by Robert Walser
The Swiss writer Robert Walser is one of the quiet geniuses of twentieth-century literature. Largely self-taught and altogether indifferent to worldly success, Walser wrote a range of short stories, essays, as well as four novels, of which Jakob von Gunten is widely recognized as the finest. The book is a young man's inquisitive and irreverent account of life in what turns out to be the most uncanny of schools. It is the work of an outsider artist, a writer of uncompromising originality and disconcerting humor, whose beautiful sentences have the simplicity and strangeness of a painting by Henri Rousseau.
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The Robber
by Robert Walser
The Robber, Robert Walser?s last novel, tells the story of a dreamer on a journey of self-discovery. It is a hybrid of love story, tragedy, and farce, with a protagonist who sweet-talks teaspoons, flirts with important politicians, plays maidservant to young boys, and uses a passerby?s mouth as an ashtray. Walser?s novel spoofs the stiff-upper-lipped European petit bourgeois and its nervous reactions to whatever threatens the stability of its worldview.
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The Confusions of Young Torless
by Robert Musil
At a bleak, isolated military school on the fringes of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, four young cadets —Torless, Beineberg, Reiting and their victim Basini—rift even further away from their school- fellows into a private world of ritual, secrecy and torture. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
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The Loser
by Thomas Bernhard
Thomas Bernhard was one of the most original writers of the twentieth century. His formal innovation ranks with Beckett and Kafka, his outrageously cantankerous voice recalls Dostoevsky, but his gift for lacerating, lyrical, provocative prose is incomparably his own.One of Bernhard's most acclaimed novels, The Loser centers on a fictional relationship between piano virtuoso Glenn Gould and two of his fellow students who feel compelled to renounce their musical ambitions in the face of Gould's incomparable genius. One commits suicide, while the other-- the obsessive, witty, and self-mocking narrator-- has retreated into obscurity. Written as a monologue in one remarkable unbroken paragraph, The Loser is a brilliant meditation on success, failure, genius, and fame.
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Wittgenstein's Nephew
by Thomas Bernhard
It is 1967, in a Viennese hospital. In separate wards: the narrator named Thomas Bernhard, is stricken with a lung ailment; his friend Paul, nephew of Ludwig Wittgenstein, is suffering fom one of his periodic bouts of madness. Bernhard traces the growth of an intense friendship between two eccentric, obsessive men who share a passion for music, a strange sense of humor, brutal honesty, and a disgust for bourgeois Vienna. "[Wittgenstein's Nephew is] a meditative fugue for mad, brilliant voices on the themes of death, death-in-life and the artist's and thinker's role in society . . . oddly moving and funny at the same time."—Joseph Coates, Chicago Tribune "Mr. Bernhard's memoir about Paul Wittgenstein is a 'confession and a guilty homage to their friendship; it takes the place of the graveside speech he never delivered. In its obsessive, elegant rhythms and narrative eloquence, it resembles a tragic aria by Richard Strauss. . . . This is a memento mori that approaches genius.'"—Richard Locke, Wall Street Journal
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Austerlitz. English
by Winfried Georg Sebald
Shares the struggle of Jacques Austerlitz to uncover his identity as he follows the memory of his childhood back to the heart of war-torn Europe, to the place from which he emigrated as a young orphan in 1939.
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The Emigrants
by Winfried Georg Sebald
Four narratives weave history and fiction together as refugees from the Holocaust remember their experiences.
