Life is a Caravanserai: Has Two Doors, I Came in One, I Went out the Other. Translated by Luise Von Flotow-Evans
Life is a Caravanserai – Has Two Doors – I Came in One – I Went Out the Other, 2000) is an autobiographically inspired novel about a girl’s childhood and adolescence in Turkey in the nineteen fifties and seventies. The family’s frequent moves are formative, just as the archaic lifestyle which is faced with the radical […]
Mother Tongue. Translated by Craig Thomas
In 1965, the author of this extraordinary volume left Turkey for Germany to work as a Gastarbeiter (guest-worker), beginning first as a cleaning lady in a factory, then becoming a stage hand in Berlin, an actress, a playwright, a director and eventually a prize-winning German author. This collection of pieces evokes the hazy hell of […]
The Appointment. Translated by Michael Hulse and Philip Boehm
The hardships and humiliations of Communist Romania are on display in this taut novel by the winner of the European Literature Prize (Müller, author of the well-received Land of Green Plums, emigrated to Berlin after being persecuted by the Romanian secret police). The narrator, an unnamed young dress-factory worker of the post-WWII generation, […]
The Land of Green Plums. Translated by Michael Hofmann
Five Romanian youths under the Ceausescu regime are the focus of this movingdepiction of the struggle to become adults who keep “eyes wide open and tightly shut at the same time.” Through the suicide of a mutual friend, the unnamed narrator?a young woman studying to become a translator?meets a trio of young men with whom […]
The Passport. Translated by Martin Chalmers
The Passport is a Nobel Prize winning novel describing the efforts of Windisch, the town miller, to move his family from a German village in Romania to the promise of West Germany. The novella is broken up into laconic chapters, titled with a simple image that often refers to a dream or a flashback, such […]
The Façade: M.N.O.P.Q. Translated by John E. Woods
The Soviet occupation of 1968 is never far from the thougths of Orten, Maltzahn, Patera and Podol, cynical Prague artists who in the late ’70s are restoring the damaged facade of a famous Bohemian castle–a hopeless project, as the restoration, attacked by industrial pollution, immediately begins to deteriorate. As they irreverently reinterpret the fading frescoes, […]
The Questionnaire, or, Prayer for a Town & a Friend. Translated by Peter Kussi
Jan Chrysostom Kepka, the narrator of Jiri Grusa’s internationally acclaimed novel, applies for a job and is asked to fill out a standard employment questionnaire. He takes the command “DO NOT CROSS OUT!” as an order not to omit anything and he embarks on a wildly imaginative search for his origins, the real nature of […]
The Call of the Toad. Translated by Ralph Mannheim
Macabre humor and deft narrative control spice this doleful, satiric tale of love, mortality and politics in a changing Eastern Europe from the pen of the contemporary German master. When Alexander Reschke first meets Alexandra Piatkowska, she is on her way to a cemetery in Gdansk, Poland. The two discover they have much in common: […]
Idiots: Five Fairy Tales and Other Stories
Fairies promise one wish—but not “immortality, health, money and love”—to each of the wretched, narcissistic protagonists in the first five stories of Arjouni’s sardonic new collection. In the title story, a fairy comes to the aid of a miserable ad exec desperate to save his company from financial ruin. A promising young film director who […]