Germanophone literature

City of Angels

by Christa Wolf & Damion Searls

The stunning final novel from East Germany’s most acclaimed writer

Three years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the writer Christa Wolf was granted access to her newly declassified Stasi files. Known for...

Stories of Five Decades

by Hermann Hesse

This selection of twenty-three stories (twenty available in English for the first time) offers a spectrum of Hesse's writing from 1899 to 1948 that could be matched only by an edition of his poetry, since in...

Rosshalde

by Hermann Hesse

Rosshalde is the classic story of a man torn between obligations to his family and his longing for a spiritual fulfillment that can only be found outside the confines of conventional society.

Johann Veraguth,...

Pictor's Metamorphoses

by Hermann Hesse

In the spring of 1922, several months after completing Siddhartha, Hermann Hesse wrote a fairy tale that was also a love story, inspired by the woman who was to become his second wife. That story, Pictor’s...

Peter Camenzind

by Hermann Hesse

Peter Camenzind, a young man from a Swiss mountain village, leaves his home and eagerly takes to the road in search of new experience. Traveling through Italy and France, Camenzind is increasingly disillusioned...

Knulp

by Hermann Hesse

First published in 1915, Knulp was Hesse's most popular book in the years before Demian. This is the first edition in English. Knulp is an amiable vagabond who wanders from town to town, staying with friends...

The Journey to the East

by Hermann Hesse

In simple, mesmerizing prose, Hermann Hesse tells of a journey both geographic and spiritual. H.H., a German choirmaster, is invited on an expedition with the League, a secret society whose members include Paul...

Narcissus and Goldmund

by Hermann Hesse

Narcissus and Goldmund is the story of a passionate yet uneasy friendship between two men of opposite character. Narcissus, an ascetic instructor at a cloister school, has devoted himself solely to scholarly...

Steppenwolf

by Hermann Hesse

Harry Haller is a sad and lonely figure, a reclusive intellectual for whom life holds no joy. He struggles to reconcile the wild primeval wolf and the rational man within himself without surrendering to the...

Beneath the Wheel

by Hermann Hesse

Hans Giebernath lives among the dull and respectable townsfolk of a sleepy Black Forest village. When he is discovered to be an exceptionally gifted student, the entire community presses him onto a path of serious...

Correction: A Novel

by Thomas Bernhard

The scientist Roithamer has dedicated the last six years of his life to “the Cone,” an edifice of mathematically exact construction that he has erected in the center of his family’s estate in honor of...

Woodcutters

by Thomas Bernhard

Fiercely observed, often hilarious, and “reminiscent of Ibsen and Strindberg” (The New York Times Book Review), this exquisitely controversial novel was initially banned in its author’s homeland.

A searing...

Concrete

by Thomas Bernhard

Instead of the book he’s meant to write, Rudolph, a Viennese musicologist, produces this dark and grotesquely funny account of small woes writ large, of profound horrors detailed and rehearsed to the point...

Wittgenstein's Nephew: A Novel

by Thomas Bernhard

It is 1967. In separate wings of a Viennese hospital, two men lie bedridden. The narrator, named Thomas Bernhard, is stricken with a lung ailment; his friend Paul, nephew of the celebrated philosopher Ludwig...

Demian

by Hermann Hesse

A brilliant journey of the psyche written by one of Germany’s most influential writers and thinkers, Herman Hesse

First published in 1919 under the pseudonyn Emil Sinclair, Demian follows the life of a troubled...

Gertrude

by Hermann Hesse

With Gertrude, Herman Hesse continues his lifelong exploration of the irreconcilable elements of human existence. In this fictional memoir, the renowned composer Kuhn recounts his tangled relationships with...

The Fabric of Night: A Novel

by Christoph Peters

By one of the most promising novelists in Germany today, The Fabric of Night is a frightening, profound reflection on the nature of illusion and reality.Albin Kranz is a sculptor, haunted by hallucinations and...

Self's Murder

by Bernhard Schlink

Gerhard Self, the seventy-something, sambuca-drinking, Sweet-Afton smoking sleuth returns in a riveting new mystery about money-laundering, murder, and mafiosi.

Despite his failing health and his girlfriend's...

Twilight and Moonbeam Alley

by Stefan Zweig & Anthea Bell

In ‘Twilight’, a fashionable lady is banished from Versailles by the King, and tries to make the best of life on her country estate. Versailles, for all its hollowness, was the only thing that gave her existence...

On A Day Like This

by Peter Stamm & Michael Hofmann

A new novel of artful understatement about mortality, estrangement, and the absurdity of life from the acclaimed author of Unformed Landscape and In Strange Gardens

On a day like any other, Andreas changes his...