MONIKA MARON, today one of Germany's greatest living writers, created Flight of Ashes and the wonderfully feisty Josepha Nadler when she herself was struggling to leave East Germany, a struggle that involved her élite communist family, the STASI, her future career, and her own conscience. The young journalist's visit to the filthy industrial town of B - Bitterfeld in the center of the GDR - challenges her moral and political assumptions...

From the celebrated author of The Radetzky March comes the tragic story of a WWI officer caught in the tumult of a world on the verge of modernity. As an Austro-Hungarian officer on the Eastern Front of World War I, Franz Tunda was captured by the Russians and sent to Siberia. Dreaming of a return to his life in Vienna, he escapes from prison-only to get caught up in the Russian Revolution, fall in love, and fight for the Bolshevik cause. Upon finally...

This first major novel by Nobel Prize-winning author Hermann Hesse incorporates a theme he returned to again and again in most of his works: the fundamental duality of existence. The youthful protagonist, Emil Sinclair, however, his older friend, Max Demian, manages to both clarify and complicate Sinclair's confusion about life's conflicting values. Recounted in engaging prose, rich in sympathy and imagination, this brilliant exploration of the polarities...

"The Castle is the story of K., the unwanted land surveyor who is never to be admitted to the Castle nor accepted in the village, and yet cannot go home. As he encounters dualities of certainty and doubt, hope and fear, and reason and nonsense, K.'s struggles in the absurd, labyrinthine world where he finds himself seem to reveal an inexplicable truth about the nature of existence."--worldcat.org.

"Dances and balls appear throughout literature as a place for young people to meet, flirt, and form relationships: as any reader of Pride and Prejudice, War and Peace, or Romeo and Juliet can attest, dance scenes provide an opportunity for writers to criticize societal expectations about courtship and partner choice, while simultaneously entertaining their readers. In this book, Sonia Gollance examines Jewish mixed-gender dancing in German and Yiddish...

"'That night Stasia took an oath, swearing to learn the recipe by heart and destroy the paper. And when she was lying in her bed again, recalling the taste with all her senses, she was sure that this secret recipe could heal wounds, avert catastrophes, and bring people happiness. But she was wrong.' At the start of the twentieth century, on the edge of the Russian Empire, a family prospers. It owes its success to a delicious chocolate recipe, passed...

"A thrilling art heist escapade infused with European high culture and luxury that doesn't shy away from the darker side of human nature. Johann Friedrich von Allmen, a bon vivant of dandified refinement, has exhausted his family fortune by living in Old World grandeur despite present-day financial constraints. Forced to downscale, Allmen inhabits the garden house of his former Zurich estate, attended by his Guatemalan butler, Carlos. When not reading...