A collection of vital autobiographical pre-WWI prose from the great German-Jewish writer Never before translated into English, this trio of works finds one of the greatest German writers of the 20th century mythologizing her own pursuit of freedom in captivatingly original fiction. In The Peter Hille Book (1906), Else Lasker-Schüler offers an elegy for her arch-bohemian mentor. But this hypnotic blend of Nietzsche, fairy tale and paganism also celebrates the one Hille called 'Tino'--the author herself--and the electrifying uncertainties of the creative life. In the 1907 text The Nights of Tino of Baghdad she sends her alter ego on a heady voyage through an imagined 'Orient'. From the banks of the Nile the narrative advances across a wide emotional landscape, using Muslim and Jewish motifs to explore the commonalities of Semitic identity. Finally, Lasker-Schüler's avatar encounters dervishes, biblical figures and a 20-year-old foetus in The Prince of Thebes. Issued on the eve of World War One, this sequence of dark fables seethes with violence and eroticism, culminating in a great clash of civilizations in which Tino leads the charge. An insightful afterword details the genesis of these Three Prose Works in the context of the author's tumultuous life. Fiction.

Since the turn of the 21st century, countless literary endeavors by 'new Germans' have entered the spotlight of academic research. Yet 'minority writing', with its distinctive renegotiation of traditional concepts of cultural identity, is far from a recent phenomenon in German literature. A hundred years previously, the intense involvement of German-Jewish intellectuals in cultural and political discourses on Jewish identity put a clear stamp on German modernism. This book is the first to unfold literary parallels between these two riveting periods in German cultural history. Drawing on the philosophical oeuvre of Jean-Luc Nancy, a comparative reading of texts by, amongst others, Beer-Hofmann, Kermani, Özdamar, Roth, Schnitzler, and Zaimoglu examines a variety of literary approaches to the thorny issue of cultural identity, while developing an overarching perspective on the ‘politics of literature’.

Brings to light unsuspectedly rich sources of humor in the works of prominent nineteenth-century women writers. Nineteenth-century German literature is seldom seen as rich in humor and irony, and women's writing from that period is perhaps even less likely to be seen as possessing those qualities. Yet since comedy is bound to societal norms, and humor and irony are recognized weapons of the weak against authority, what this innovative study reveals should not be surprising: women writers found much to laugh at in a bourgeois age when social constraints, particularlyon women, were tight. Helen Chambers analyzes prose fiction by leading female writers of the day who prominently employ humor and irony. Arguing that humor and irony involve cognitive and rational processes, she highlights the inadequacy of binary theories of gender that classify the female as emotional and the male as rational. Chambers focuses on nine women writers: Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, Ida Hahn-Hahn, Ottilie Wildermuth, Helene Böhlau, Marie vonEbner-Eschenbach, Ada Christen, Clara Viebig, Isolde Kurz, and Ricarda Huch. She uncovers a rich seam of unsuspected or forgotten variety, identifies fresh avenues of approach, and suggests a range of works that merit a place onuniversity reading lists and attention in scholarly studies. Helen Chambers is Professor of German at the University of St Andrews, Scotland, UK.

German writers, be it Goethe, Nietzsche, Marx, Brecht or Mann, have had a profound influence on the modern world. This Very Short Introduction illuminates the particular character and power of German literature, and examines its impact on the wider cultural world.

In this new selection and translation, Peter Wortsman mines Franz Kafka's entire opus of short prose--including works published in the author's brief lifetime, posthumously published stories, journals, and letters--for narratives that sound the imaginative depths of the great German-Jewish scribe from Prague. It is the first volume in English to consider his deeply strange, resonantly humane letters and journal entries alongside his classic short fiction and lyrical vignettes "Transformed" is a vivid retranslation of one of Kafka's signature stories, "Die Verwandlung," commonly rendered in English as "The Metamorphosis." Composed of short, black comic parables, fables, fairy tales, and reflections, Konundrums also includes classic stories like "In the Penal Colony," Kafka's prescient foreshadowing of the nightmare of the Twentieth Century, refreshing the writer's mythic storytelling powers for a new generation of readers. Contents: • Words are Miserable Miners of Meaning • Letter to Ernst Rowohlt • Reflections • Concerning Parables • Children on the Country Road • The Spinning Top • The Street-Side Window • At Night • Unhappiness • Clothes Make the Man • On the Inability to Write • From Somewhere in the Middle • I Can Also Laugh • The Need to Be Alone • So I Sat at My Stately Desk • A Writer's Quandary • Give it Up! • Eleven Sons • Paris Outing • The Bridge • The Trees • The Truth About Sancho Pansa • The Silence of the Sirens • Prometheus • Poseidon • The Municipal Coat of Arms • A Message from the Emperor • The Next Village Over • First Sorrow • The Hunger Artist • Josephine, Our Meistersinger, or the Music of Mice • Investigations of a Dog • A Report to an Academy • A Hybrid • Transformed • In the Penal Colony • From The Burrow • Selected Aphorisms • Selected Last Conversation Shreds • In the Caves of the Unconscious: K is for Kafka (An Afterword) • The Back of Words (A Post Script)

The magnificent second novel from the legendary author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest Following the astonishing success of his first novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Ken Kesey wrote what Charles Bowden calls "one of the few essential books written by an American in the last half century." This wild-spirited tale tells of a bitter strike that rages through a small lumber town along the Oregon coast. Bucking that strike out of sheer cussedness are the Stampers. Out of the Stamper family's rivalries and betrayals Ken Kesey has crafted a novel with the mythic impact of Greek tragedy. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.