Author: Hofmann, Michael (Keywords)

'Berlin Alexanderplatz' is one of the masterpieces of European literature. One of its greatest admirers was a brilliant young German director, Rainer Fassbinder whose epic 15-hour film adaption is regarded as a classic today. Many stills from his film are included. Alexander Stephen has written t...

Franz Biberkopf is back on the streets of Berlin. Determined to go straight after a stint in prison, he finds himself thwarted by an unpredictable external agency that looks an awful lot like fate. Cheated, humiliated, thrown from a moving car; embroiled in an underworld of pimps, thugs, drunks a...

After Franz Kafka's death, in perhaps the most important of all acts of literary disobedience, his executor refused to agree to Kafka's wish that his great mass of unpublished fiction be destroyed. This fiction included not only 'The Castle' and 'The Trial' but also the amazingly varied, chilling...

'Cow' is the story of a Spanish agricultural labourer, Ambrosio, who goes to Switzerland as a Gastarbeiter. He is bound for Innenwald, a village in the Swiss highlands, and the novel begins as he is about to spend a summer working for Farmer Knuchel. It ends in the abattoir of the neighbouring ci...

'The Emperor's Tomb' is a haunting elegy to the vanished world of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and to the passing of time and the loss of youth and friends.

With this new collection of poems selected and translated by Michael Hofmann, Gottfired Benn, at long last, promises to attain in English the presence and importance that he so richly deserves.

Georg is on the verge of retirement. No one notices him anymore at the office, and there is no dinner waiting for him at home. He seems to dissolve slowly and a nameless horror seizes him. Sabrina is flattered when an artist approaches her. But when she sees herself as a work of art for the first...

Berlin. 11 July 1986. They meet by chance on a bus. She is a young student, he is older and married. Theirs is an intense and sudden attraction, fuelled by a shared passion for music and art, and heightened by the secrecy they must maintain. But when she strays for a single night he cannot forgiv...

Berlin. 11 July 1986. They meet by chance on a bus. She is a young student, he is older and married. Theirs is an intense and sudden attraction, fuelled by a shared passion for music and art, and heightened by the secrecy they must maintain. But when she strays for a single night he cannot forgiv...

Only one character appears in Kafka's work; the homo domesticus, so Jewish and so German and so eager to keep his place. Borges described Kafka's characterisation in such a manner. This volume includes some of his most famous stories.