The Thirtieth Year: Stories

Author	Bertolt Brecht
ISBN	1559702524

The Threepenny Opera was Brecht's first and greatest commercial success, and it remains one of his best-loved and most-performed plays. Based on John Gay's eighteenth-century Beggar's Opera, the play is set in Victorian England's Soho but satirizes the bourgeois society of the Weimar Republic...

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	Arthur Schnitzler
ISBN	0413495302

The apocryphal saying "Everything in the world is about sex, except sex, sex is about power" could stand as a review for Arthur Schnitzler's Reigen.

No wonder this was seen as quite scandalous in early 20th century Vienna! And the scandal is not the sex and the symmetry of the partner change,...

Author	Novalis
ISBN	0881335746

Strange and ingenious, this extraordinary fusion of novel, fairy tale, and poem, published posthumously in 1802, is the most representative work of early German Romanticism. It reflects, in part, events in the life of its author, who is best known for his "Hymns to the Night". Young Henry, a medieval...

Author	Peter Handke
ISBN	1590173066

Short Letter, Long Farewell is one the most inventive and exhilarating of the great Peter Handke’s novels. Full of seedy noir atmospherics and boasting an air of generalized delirium, the book starts by introducing us to a nameless young German who has just arrived in America, where he hopes to get...

Author

Michel Houellebecq

Realising that his New Year is probably going to be a disaster, as usual, our narrator, on impulse, walks into a travel agency to book a week in the sun. Sensitive to his limited means and dislike of Muslim countries, the travel agent suggests an island full of 21st century hedonism, set in a bizarre lunar...