Pavel's Letters
10 best books like Pavel's Letters (Monika Maron): Lieutenant Gustl, Crossfire, The Stechlin, The Commandant, Leaden Wings, Anton Reiser, Couples, Passersby, The Hothouse, The Case of Sergeant Grischa, Life of Christ
| Author | Arthur Schnitzler |
| ISBN | 1557131767 |
Viennese author Schnitzler's brief 1901 novel depicts the Austrian crisis at the turn of the century and the impending collapse of the dream of the empire. Bored at the opera, egocentric young Lieutenant Gustl contemplates which women are flirting with him; the fact that there are too many Jews in the...
| Author | Miyuki Miyabe |
| ISBN | 4770029934 |
A harrowing tale of murder and retribution.
Young, pretty Junko Aoki has an extraordinary ability-she can start fires through sheer force of will. When she begins using her gift of pyrokinesis to take the law into her own hands and punish violent criminals, her executions attract the attention...
| Author | Theodor Fontane |
| ISBN | 1571130241 |
Theodor Fontane (1819-98), widely regarded as Germany's most significant novelist between Goethe and Thomas Mann, pioneered the German novel of manners and upper-class society, following a trend in European fiction of the period. The Stechlin is Fontane's last book and his political testament....
| Author | Jessica Anderson |
| ISBN | 0333179277 |
In the 1830s, the penal settlement of Moreton Bay on the Brisbane River is under the command of Patrick Logan. His administration has been denounced by the liberal press in Sydney, but he scorns such criticism. How can it harm him when he had governed according to the rules?
Flogged and brutalised,...
| Author | Zhang Jie |
| ISBN | 0860687643 |
Published in 1980, Heavy Wings focuses on the Morning Light Auto Works in Beijing, a microcosm of the ongoing struggle between reformers who want to allow a measure of freedom and party hardliners clinging to the ideology that justifies their privilege and power. It provoked a storm of controversy...
| Author | Karl Philipp Moritz |
| ISBN | 0140446095 |
Well received in its own day and all but forgotten in the last century, Anton Reiser (1785) has regained in our times the popular attention it richly merits. Subtitled a "psychological novel" by its author, who also called it a biography, the work is actually a highly authentic autobiography. The work...
| Author | Botho Strauß |
| ISBN | 0810112426 |
In Couples, Passersby, the controversial German writer Botho Strauss deftly combines the fantastic and the mundane to depict a society in which people pair off only to find greater isolation and alienation. In Strauss's world, love turns not to hate but to indifference, and lovers fade into strangers,...
| Author | Wolfgang Koeppen |
| ISBN | 0393049027 |
Brilliant. Four-and-a-half stars. How I subcutaneously shivered with each recognition of a Keetenheuve who was me and/or that from within me which constituted a part of Keetenheuve: solipsistic self-absorption resonating in the Key of I Minor, the ego as it's shown inside the other. No matter the...
| Author | Arnold Zweig |
| ISBN | 1585673358 |
During the late 20's many of those who experienced World War I wrote semi-autobiographical novels. One of them was Arnold Zweig (1887-1968), a German writer, anti-war and anti-fascist activist. He is known for his six-part cycle on World War I called The Great War of the White Men and the first part of...
| Author | Giovanni Papini |
| ISBN | 1417923806 |
Last Tuesday morning, a 45-year old woman jumped from the 27th floor of the building where she used to work. That building was just across where I work. She was there, lying on the pavement, lifeless, headless. When she jumped, her head caught one of the ledges of the building and so her head got severed....
| Author | Anne Hébert |
| ISBN | 0887845975 |
Flora Fontages is a famous Parisian actress who has been in exile from her native Canada for twenty years. When word comes that her long-estranged daughter, Maud, has disappeared in Quebec City, she decides to return home, accepting the part of Winnie, the old crone in Samuel Beckett's Happy Days, at...
Winner of the German Book Prize, The Blindness of the Heart is a dark marvel of a novel by one of Europe’s freshest young voices— a family story spanning two world wars and several generations in a German family. In the devastating opening scene, a woman named Helene stands with her seven-year-old...
| Author | Martin Walser |
| ISBN | 3518365940 |
Der 35-jährige Anselm Kristlein, verheiratet und Vater dreier Kinder, versucht sich seit dem Abbruch seines Studiums als Vertreter. Als ihm ein Bekannter das Abgebot unterbreitet, als Werbetexter zu arbeiten, steigt er innerhalb eines Jahres zum gefragten Experten auf. Diesen Karrieresprung...
| Author | Heruy Wolde Selassie |
Blattengeta Heruy Welde Sellase (8 May 1878 – 19 September 1938; ብላቴን፡ጌታ፡ኅሩይ፡ወልደ፡ሥላሴ Blatten-Geta Həruy Wäldä-səllase) was a Foreign Minister of Ethiopia and a writer in Amharic..
| Author | Edmund Wilson |
| ISBN | 0877457697 |
It took me awhile before I got really interested on this book's story. The prose is in the first person and told by an unnamed narrator. He tells the reader not only the daily happenings in his life but also more importantly, about the two women that he just met at the beginning of the story. Their names are...
A ridiculously overheated melodrama set on a decaying southern plantation, featuring a prideful, spoiled young "aristocrat", his mother who encourages him in those traits, his neglected, weepy wife, their downtrodden servants and field hands, a "modern" cousin, an earthy lower-class tenant......
A finely nuanced exploration of responsibility, snobbery and culture clash from one of the twentieth centrury's finest novelists.
When Amy's husband dies on holiday in Istanbul, she is supported by the kindly but rather slovenly Martha, a young American novelist who lives in London. Upon...
| Author | Felix Timmermans |
| ISBN | 3458331301 |
Der lebensfrohe und naturverbundene Pallieter, über dessen Alter und bisheriges Leben der Leser nichts Genaueres erfährt, lebt auf einem kleinen Hof im Tal des Flüsschens Nethe zusammen mit seiner frommen Schwester Charlot, die ihm den Haushalt führt, sowie dem Pferd Beiaard, dem Hund Lubas...
Fool's Gold (Modern Greek Writers)
Myrsini Panayotou, an Athenian girl about to start university, learns of the coup d'etat that brought to power the infamous dictatorship of the "Colonels" in her country in the early hours of Friday, 21st April 1967. The child of a well-to-do family, Myrsini enthusiastically joins the underground...
| Author | Hermann Broch |
| ISBN | 0810160781 |
Murder, lust, shame, hypocrisy, and suicide are at the center of The Guiltless, Hermann Broch's novel about the disintegration of European society in the first three decades of the twentieth century. Broch's characters—an apathetic man who can barely remember his own name (Broch mostly refers...
One of the most exquisite proses that I've ever read and it is delivered via stream-of-consciousness. They say that Sunetra Gupta (born 1965) is the true heir of Virginia Woolf but for me her prose is even better because it is more contemporary; that means you don't have to imagine while reading some far...
| Author | Kristien Hemmerechts |
| ISBN | 9025422128 |
'Je mag niets verdringen,' heeft Margot van haar mama geleerd. 'Je moet over alles praten, want als je iets verdringt, krijg je kanker of kom je bij een psychiater terecht.'
'Ik verdring niets. Wat zou ik verdringen?' antwoordt Margot wrevelig.
Van haar vader moet ze haar eigen leven leiden....
| Author | Eduardo Mendoza |
| ISBN | 8422665840 |
Al famoso y mediocre escritor Carlos Prullás, autor de comedias ligeras para distracción saludable de la clase media, todo se le empezó a torcer el día que entró en su vida la guapa Lilí, una jovencita sin mucho talento pero con enormes ganas de abrirse paso en el mundillo teatral. De la noche a la...
