Michael Hofmann

A seemingly ordinary man, Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning only to discover that he has been transformed into a gigantic insect and must deal with the depression over his new physical alteration, as well as the rejection of his family, in a new translation honoring the 125th anniversary of the author's birth.

Alexander is torn between two very different women. Sonia, his wife and business partner, is everything a man could want: intelligent, gorgeous, charming, and ambitious. But when the seven-year itch sets in, Alexander soon finds himself rekindling an affair with his college lover, Ivona. The young Polish woman who worked in a Catholic mission is the polar opposite of Sonia: dull, passive, taciturn, and plain. Despite having little in common with Ivona,...

"Werner Herzog, one of the most revered filmmakers of all time, in his first book in many years, tells the story of Hiroo Onoda, a Japanese soldier who continued to defend a small island in the Philippines for twenty-nine years after the end of World War Two In 1997, Werner Herzog was in Tokyo to direct an opera. His hosts there asked, whom would you like to meet? He replied instantly: Hiroo Onoda. Onoda was a former solider famous for having quixotically...

""O, it has happened little by little, as many things simply happen little by little, Mother said, and told us everything about Herr Veilchenfeld, as far as it was known to her." Germany, late 1930s. Walking into town on a hot summer evening, the elderly professor of philosophy Herr Veilchenfeld encounters a group of local drunks. He is humiliated and assaulted; his hair is shorn. The police "don't interfere in such minor matters." What happens to...

"Erpenbeck's new novel Kairos tells the story of the romance begun in East Berlin at the end of the 1980s when nineteen-year-old Katharina meets by chance a married writer in his fifties named Hans. Their passionate yet difficult long-running affair takes place against the background of the declining GDR, through the upheavals wrought by its dissolution in 1989 and then what comes after. In her unmistakable style and with enormous sweep, Erpenbeck...

"An original collection of the best and most provocative work by Scottish poet W.S. Graham, the celebrated author of "Nightfishing" and Malcolm Mooney's Land. One of the most unusual and original poets of the last century, the Scottish poet W. S. Graham had a career that fell into two distinct parts. His early work was rapt and wild and incantatory--poems filled with linguistic fireworks that can be set beside those of his near contemporary Dylan...

The Hotel Years gathers sixty-four pieces--never before translated into English--from 1919 to 1939, beginning in Vienna just at the end of the First War, and ending in Paris with the Second War about to begin. Joseph Roth was the outstanding journalist and commentator of the day. Roth needed journalism to survive; in his six-volume collected works in German, there are three of fiction and three of journalism. He published an article on average two...