Biography

By Charles Darwent “A meticulously researched, elegantly written, and generously illustrated biography of an artist whose personality was as enigmatic as his art…Darwent deftly characterizes the outsized egos and philosophical and petty rivalries that roiled the Bauhaus…An authoritative and sensitive portrait of a modern master.” ―Kirkus Reviews, starred review“A gripping biography of a German artist unjustly pigeonholed as the creator of interminable variations of pictures of squares…Darwent draws extensively on Albers’s previously unpublished writings and drawings to fully capture the artist’s life…Sympathetic and generously illustrated.”―Publishers Weekly Drawing on extensive unpublished archival writings, documents, and illustrations, this is the first full-scale biography of one of the 20th-century’s great artists. In his accessible study of the “whole” Albers, Charles Darwent combats the fables while telling the fascinating story of an artist, friend, and intellectual. Among Albers’s unpublished papers are letters from friends John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, Richard Serra, and Eva Hesse, as well as fans and collectors ranging from the composer Virgil Thomson to the cartoonist Saul Steinberg. If his network of influence was surprisingly wide, so too, were his interests. He started life at the Bauhaus as a glass-maker and went on to create fonts, to run their famous wallpaper workshop, and to make furniture whose designs are still in production eighty years later. He pioneered the study of color at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, and chaired the design department at Yale University. While books have been written about Albers for specialist audiences, this new volume fulfills the clear need for a more general study. Hardcover400 pagesThames & Hudson, 20186.8 x 1.5 x 9.8 inchesISBN 9780500519103Artist Monographs, Art History, Biography

Josef Albers: Life and Work

By Stefan ZweigTranslated by Eden and Cedar Paul "Certainly no one can arise unmoved from the reading of this powerful work."—The New Republic"Stefan Zweig’s remarkable study of Marie Antoinette; A full-bodied biography which bids fair to be the definitive life of that tragic queen."—The New York Times"The most influential biography of Marie Antoinette."—The Guardian Stefan Zweig based his biography of Marie Antoinette, who became the Queen of France at the age of fifteen, on the correspondence between her and her mother, and her great love the Count Axel von Fersen. Zweig analyzes the chemistry of a woman's soul from her intimate pleasures to her public suffering as a Queen under the weight of misfortune and history. Zweig describes Marie Antoinette in the King's bedroom, in the enchanted and extravagant world of the Trianon, and with her children. And in his account of 'The Revolution', he describes her resolve during the failed escape to Varennes, her imprisonment in the Conciergerie and her final tragic destiny under the guillotine. Zweig's account has been the definitive biography of Marie Antoinette since its publication, inspiring Antonia Fraser and the recent film adaptation. Paperback592 pagesPushkin Press, 2017Originally published in 19325.1 x 1.5 x 7.8 inchesISBN 9781906548308Literature, Biography, History

Marie Antoinette

By Richard H. King “A major work of scholarship and a truly original and pathbreaking way of looking at Arendt and her work. King situates Arendt in an American context in which she is rarely considered, and he draws on his deep knowledge of U.S. intellectual, political, and social history as well as German philosophy to create a book that is one of the most original and important works on Arendt to have been written in many years.”—Dan Stone, Royal Holloway, University of London“King’s great contribution to the literature on Arendt is to show, in fine-grained terms, how her political theory was the result of a quintessentially American experience: to arrive on American shores an immigrant, to draw on resources from both an old country and a new, imagined one, and to participate in the riot of reinvention.”—Los Angeles Review of Books“This book offers a detailed history of Arendt’s intellectual milieu in the United States, moving between her published writings, reviews and correspondence with her key interlocutors. . . . This is a concentrated, slow-burning book that requires careful reading, but is without question a rewarding theoretical and historical contribution.”—Times Literary Supplement German-Jewish political philosopher Hannah Arendt (1906–75) fled from the Nazis to New York in 1941, and during the next thirty years in America she wrote her best-known and most influential works, such as The Human Condition, The Origins of Totalitarianism, and On Revolution. Yet, despite the fact that a substantial portion of her oeuvre was written in America, not Europe, no one has directly considered the influence of America on her thought—until now. In Arendt and America, historian Richard H. King argues that while all of Arendt’s work was haunted by her experience of totalitarianism, it was only in her adopted homeland that she was able to formulate the idea of the modern republic as an alternative to totalitarian rule. Situating Arendt within the context of U.S. intellectual, political, and social history, King reveals how Arendt developed a fascination with the political thought of the Founding Fathers. King also re-creates her intellectual exchanges with American friends and colleagues, such as Dwight Macdonald and Mary McCarthy, and shows how her lively correspondence with sociologist David Riesman helped her understand modern American culture and society. In the last section of Arendt and America, King sets out the context in which the Eichmann controversy took place and follows the debate about “the banality of evil” that has continued ever since. As King shows, Arendt’s work, regardless of focus, was shaped by postwar American thought, culture, and politics, including the Civil Rights Movement and the Cold War.For Arendt, the United States was much more than a refuge from Nazi Germany; it was a stimulus to rethink the political, ethical, and historical traditions of human culture. This authoritative combination of intellectual history and biography offers a unique approach for thinking about the influence of America on Arendt’s ideas and also the effect of her ideas on American thought. Paperback416 pagesUniversity of Chicago Press, 20186 x 1.3 x 9 inchesISBN 9780226565538Biography, History, Philosophy

Arendt and America [Paperback]

By Elisabeth Young-Bruehl Winner of the 1983 Alfred Harcourt Prize Award for Biography and Memoirs“Both a personal and an intellectual biography...It represents biography at its best.”—Peter Berger, front page, The New York Times Book Review“A story of surprising drama...At last, we can see Arendt whole.”—Jim Miller, Newsweek“Indispensable to anyone interested in the life, the thought, or...the example of Hannah Arendt.”—Mark Feeney, Boston Globe This highly acclaimed, prize-winning biography of one of the foremost political philosophers of the twentieth century is here reissued in a trade paperback edition for a new generation of readers. In a new preface the author offers an account of writings by and about Arendt that have appeared since the book’s 1982 publication, providing a reassessment of her subject’s life and achievement. Paperback620 pagesYale University Press, 20046.2 x 1 x 7.2 inchesISBN 9780300105889Biography, Philosophy

Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World, Second Edition

By Fernando González Viñas and José LázaroEmmy Ball-Hennings war Schriftstellerin und Dichterin, nebenbei galt sie als Muse der Literaten und Künstler der avantgardistischen Bohème-Szene, die sich Anfang des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts in Berlin und München entwickelte.Sie schrieb Gedichtbände und Romane, kam aber aufgrund ihrer prekären Lebensumstände häufig mit dem Gesetz in Konflikt.Nach einer mehrmonatigen Gefängnisstrafe emigrierte sie in die Schweiz. Gemeinsam mit Hugo Ball gründete Emmy Hennings im Jahre 1916 mit dem Zu?rcher „Cabaret Voltaire“ die Geburtsstätte der Dada-Bewegung.Die zu Unrecht Vergessene, wenn es um diese Zäsur in der Kunstgeschichte geht, hielt das „Cabaret Voltaire“ wirtschaftlich durch ihre Tätigkeit als Sängerin und ihre anziehende Ausstrahlung am Laufen.Fernando Gonzáles Viñas und José Lázaro erzählen in „Alles ist Dada“ die Geschichte eines Lebens, das in seiner Radikalität vollkommen aus der Zeit gefallen zu sein schien.Paperback232 pagesText in GermanAvant Verlag, 20206.9 x 9.3 inches ISBN 9783964450340Biography, Dada, Woman Writer, Graphic Novel

Alles ist Dada: Emmy Ball-Hennings

By Stephen Parker This first English language biography of Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) in two decades paints a strikingly new picture of one of the twentieth century's most controversial cultural icons. First published in 2014 and now available in paperback, it was critically lauded and declared the definitive life of this great artist and writer. Drawing on letters, diaries and unpublished material, including Brecht's medical records, Parker offers a rich and enthralling account of Brecht's life and work, viewed through the prism of the artist. Tracing his extraordinary life, from his formative years in Augsburg, through the First World War, his politicization during the Weimar Republic and his years of exile, up to the Berliner Ensemble's dazzling productions in Paris and London, Parker shows how Brecht achieved his transformative effect upon world theatre and poetry. Bertolt Brecht: A Literary Life is a powerful portrait of a great, compulsively contradictory personality, whose artistry left its lasting imprint on modern culture. Paperback704 pagesMethuen Drama, 20156.14 x 1.44 x 9.21 inchesISBN 9781474240000Biography, Bertolt Brecht

Bertolt Brecht: A Literary Life

Von Margret Greiner Vom Modell der Wiener Moderne zur erfolgreichen New Yorker Galeristin: Die Romanbiografie einer außergewöhnlichen Frau im 20. Jahrhundert, illustriert mit Bildern und historischen Fotografien. Hardcover304 pagesText in German Verlag Kremayr & Scheriau, 20195.5 x 1 x 8.7 inches ISBN 9783218011853 Art History, Biography

Ich will unsterblich werden!: Friederike Beer-Monti und ihre Maler

By Kirsty Bell“With sleuthing interest and novelistic flair, Kirsty Bell’s The Undercurrents has ruptured familiar terrain…an associative thesis on the dangers of repression, from gargantuan acts of genocide to the comparatively subtle shames of familial collapse…An enchanting and sometimes disturbing symbolism runs through The Undercurrents, as Bell imaginatively weaves the city’s hard factuality with the emotional and physical experience of living in it.”—frieze“From the first moment I heard Kirsty Bell read from her writing, I have yearned for the book she was then working on. And now here it is, perfect and perfectly balanced, a clear-eyed and beautifully written account about place, about consciousness. I treasure The Undercurrents, and so will you.”—Hilton Als, author of White Girls The Undercurrents is a dazzling work of biography, memoir, and cultural criticism told from a precise vantage point: a stately nineteenth-century house on Berlin’s Landwehr Canal, a site at the center of great historical changes, but also smaller domestic ones. The view from this house offers a ringside seat onto the city’s theater of action. The building has stood on the banks of the canal since 1869, its feet in the West but looking East, right into the heart of a metropolis in the making, on a terrain inscribed indelibly with trauma. When her marriage breaks down, Kirsty Bell—a British-American art critic, adrift in her mid-forties—becomes fixated on the history of her building and of her adoptive city. Taking the view from her apartment window as her starting point, she turns to the lives of the house’s various inhabitants, to accounts penned by Walter Benjamin, Rosa Luxemburg, and Gabriele Tergit, and to the female protagonists in the works of Theodor Fontane, Irmgard Keun, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. A new cultural topography of Berlin emerges, one which taps into energetic undercurrents to recover untold or forgotten stories beneath the city’s familiar narratives.Paperback400 pagesOther Press, 20225.26 x 1.05 x 7.97 inchesISBN 9781635423440Literature, Memoir

The Undercurrents: A Story of Berlin

By Walter Benjamin Translated by Shierry Weber Nicholsen An elegant new translation of Benjamin’s moving evocation of the experiences of his urban childhood Composed in exile in the 1930s and pub­lished as a whole only after his death, the miniatures that make up Benjamin’s Berlin Childhood are crystallized images of child­hood experienced in a city later surrendered to fascism. No ordinary autobiography, the book is a Proustian experiment in memory and a meditative tour of the iconic spaces of a city irretrievably lost to the adult. Instead of details of family and friends, these minia­tures evoke the sensory richness of childhood in images of the squares and courtyards, the parks and monuments of Berlin, the child’s schoolbooks and the gloomy flats of elderly relatives. As Benjamin’s friend Theodor Adorno writes in his afterword, ‘the images the book brings up into a disturbing prox­imity are not idyllic and not contemplative. The shadow of Hitler’s Reich falls across them. Dreamlike, they unite that horror with something that has long existed.’ This new translation includes an introduc­tion by Antonia Hofstätter, highlighting the way this nearly century-old work resonates with contemporary readers and inspires hope by providing access to strata of experience not governed by instrumentality and domination. Hardcover144 pagesVerso, 20255 1/12 x 7 4/5 inchesISBN 9781836740148Philosophy, Autobiography

Berlin Childhood around 1900

By Mel Gordon The Seven Addictions and Five Professions of Anita Berber is the first contemporary biography of a notorious actor/dancer/poet/playwright who scandalized sex-obsessed Weimar Berlin during the 1920s. In an era where everything was permitted, Anita Berber‘s celebrations of “Depravity, Horror and Ecstasy” were condemned and censored. She often haunted Weimar Berlin’s hotel lobbies, nightclubs and casinos, radiantly naked except for an elegant sable wrap, a pet monkey hanging from her neck, and a silver brooch packed with cocaine. Multi-talented Anita saw no boundaries between her personal life and her taboo-shattering performances. As such, she was Europe’s first postmodern woman. Among those Anita Berber claimed as members of her vast sexual harem were Marlene Dietrich, Magnus Hirschfeld (the founder of modern sexology and gay liberation), Klaus Mann, Conrad Veidt, Lawrence Durrell, and the King of Yugoslavia. Berber acted in Fritz Lang’s Dr. Mabuse: The Gambler and starred in the silent epic, Lucifer. Even Leni Riefenstahl credits Berber for inspiring her controversial career. After sated Berliners finally tired of Anita Berber’s libidinous antics, she became a “carrion soul that even the hyenas ignored,” dying in 1928 at the age of 29. The Seven Addictions and Five Professions of Anita Berber chronicles a remarkable career, including over 150 photographs and drawings that recreate Anita’s enduring “Repertoire of the Damned.” Paperback200 pagesFeral House Books, 20067 x 0.5 x 10 inchesISBN 9781932595123Biography, Film, Theater

The Seven Addictions and Five Professions of Anita Berber: Weimar Berlin's Priestess of Depravity

By Elias Canetti Translated by Joachim Neugroschel "His exacting presence honors literature"—George Steiner"Canetti is one of our great imaginers and solitary men of genius"—Iris Murdoch"Canetti is someone who has felt in a profound way the responiblity of words. . . There is no doctrine, but there is a great deal of scorn, urgency, grief, and euphoria. The message of the mind's passions is passion. 'I try to imagine someone saying to Shakespeare, "Relax!"' says Canetti. His work eloquently defends tension, exertion, moral and amoral seriousness."—Susan SontagElias Canetti, winner of the 1981 Nobel Prize for Literature, is one of the major intellectual figures of the twentieth century. He is a master of many genres, having written both a great novel—Auto-da-Fe—and a great work of social theory—Crowds and Power. But Canetti's genius is perhaps nowhere more evident than in his autobiography. The Torch in My Ear, the second volume of Canetti's memoirs, is above all else the account of his admiration for the first great mentor of his adulthood, the Viennese writer Karl Kraus. The book is also a portrait of Canetti's first wife, Veza. Within the framework of these great passions, Canetti provides an astonishing account of the Vienna and Berlin of the 1920s. The voices of Kraus, Veza, and Canetti's mother are accompanied by those of Brecht, Isaac Babel, George Grosz, and many others. Paperback384 pagesFarrar Straus & Giroux, 19836 x 9 inchesISBN 9780374518042Biography

The Torch in My Ear

By Otto DixOtto Dix (1891–1969) is considered one of the true lions of 20th-century art, a man who established himself as an uncompromising artist that refused to temper how he rendered the realities that he witnessed. Dix’s early works often depict the true brutalities of the WWI battlefields and trenches he served in for over three years, as well as the decadent underworld of 1920s Berlin.With the publication of this first of three volumes of an extensive selection of letters, the most comprehensive collection of Otto Dix texts at last comes into print in English. Encompassing well over 1,000 letters, and ranging from friends and family to other artists, collectors, colleagues, critics & biographers, the letters offer a personal portrait of six decades of the 20th century.Dix himself was a controversial figure throughout his life, and while he claimed never to write self-testimonials, the artist had much to say about the widest range of subjects in his private correspondence. Therein, we discover much about a figure who exhibited a gruff, often abrasive persona to many, a man who depicted war with unrepentant brutality yet who could at the same time pen the most romantic, schmaltzy letters to his wife and sketch amusing caricatures to his daughter.Following his experiences throughout WWI, Dix immediately took up with the dadaists in Dresden in 1919 and became an established figure as part of the Sezession. A few years later, after his first portrait commission in Dusseldorf in 1922, Dix met his future wife, Martha, with whom he would go on to raise three children, and who is one of the principle correspondents in this volume of letters. Some of his most significant work was produced in the 1920s, including his powerful Krieg (War) portfolio, for which the Nazis branded him a “degenerate artist” and forced him to resign his professorship in 1933. Condemned to internal exile, Dix thereafter resided in Hemmenhofen, in the extreme southwest part of Germany. Twelve years later, he would suffer further indignities from the Nazis when ordered to join the Volkssturm in 1945. Dix ended up in a prisoner-of-war camp, again a survivor of a second harrowing cataclysm. After his release, from 1946 onwards, the painter lived between East and West Germany, never truly at home in either ideologically, yet he remained prolific, continuing to produce art until the end of his life, having lived through two World Wars as well as the “Cold War.”​This first volume covers the period 1904–1927 and the heart of it is a selection of Dix’s postcards from the WWI front written to his school friend in Dresden, Helene Jakob, a form of artistic reportage of uncanny power. Recipient of the Die schönsten Deutschen Bücher shortlist in 2014, Dix’s letters will prove to be of considerable interest to art historians, scholars of Expressionism, and aficionados of Dix, all of whom will encounter the artist as never before.Hardcover284 pages Contra Mundum Press, 20165.98 x 0.75 x 9.02 inchesISBN 9781940625188History, Literary Letters

Letters, Vol. 1 (Otto Dix)

By Irene Gammel "Irene Gammel's Baroness Elsa mounts an enthusiastic case for her as one of the great unsung modernists."—Village Voice"The Baroness could not have asked for a more thoughtful and engaged monument than Gammel's book."—The New York Times Book Review Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (1874-1927) is considered by many to be the first American dadaist as well as the mother of dada. An innovator in poetic form and an early creator of junk sculpture, "the Baroness" was best known for her sexually charged, often controversial performances. Some thought her merely crazed, others thought her a genius. The editor Margaret Anderson called her "perhaps the only figure of our generation who deserves the epithet extraordinary." Yet despite her great notoriety and influence, until recently her story and work have been little known outside the circle of modernist scholars. In Baroness Elsa, Irene Gammel traces the extraordinary life and work of this daring woman, viewing her in the context of female dada and the historical battles fought by women in the early twentieth century. Striding through the streets of Berlin, Munich, New York, and Paris wearing such adornments as a tomato-soup can bra, teaspoon earrings, and black lipstick, the Baroness erased the boundaries between life and art, between the everyday and the outrageous, between the creative and the dangerous. Her art objects were precursors to dada objects of the teens and twenties, her sound and visual poetry were far more daring than those of the male modernists of her time, and her performances prefigured feminist body art and performance art by nearly half a century. Paperback562 pagesThe MIT Press, 20037 x 1.3 x 9 inchesISBN 9780262572156Dada

Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada, and Everyday Modernity

By Edward Skidelsky "Skidelsky gives a close, technical account of the ways in which Cassirer was never just a Marburg School stereotype; but he aligned himself neither with the logical positivists nor with the Heideggerian, existentialist tradition which between them carved up the field of 20th-century philosophy, as they arguably continue to do."—David Simpson, London Review of Books"Skidelsky's book is a must read for those interested in the history of ideas in general and for academic philosophers in particular. Indeed, philosophers, particularly of the Anglo-American variety, will find this book especially enlightening."—Kevin Aho, European Legacy"A major accomplishment and an excellent introduction to Cassirer's philosophy. Most important, Skidelsky shows that Cassirer did not simply align himself with the tradition of German political thought reaching from Humboldt and Goethe to the later Thomas Mann, but that his entire philosophy was actually subservient to the project of rethinking the basis of political liberalism. Skidelsky overturns the widely accepted view that Cassirer was an apolitical epistemologist."—John Michael Krois, author of Cassirer: Symbolic Forms and History This is the first English-language intellectual biography of the German-Jewish philosopher Ernst Cassirer (1874-1945), a leading figure on the Weimar intellectual scene and one of the last and finest representatives of the liberal-idealist tradition. Edward Skidelsky traces the development of Cassirer's thought in its historical and intellectual setting. He presents Cassirer, the author of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, as a defender of the liberal ideal of culture in an increasingly fragmented world, and as someone who grappled with the opposing forces of scientific positivism and romantic vitalism. Cassirer's work can be seen, Skidelsky argues, as offering a potential resolution to the ongoing conflict between the "two cultures" of science and the humanities--and between the analytic and continental traditions in philosophy. The first comprehensive study of Cassirer in English in two decades, this book will be of great interest to analytic and continental philosophers, intellectual historians, political and cultural theorists, and historians of twentieth-century Germany. Paperback304 pagesPrinceton University Press, 20086.1 x 0.8 x 9.2 inchesISBN 9780691152356Biography, Philosophy

Ernst Cassirer: The Last Philosopher of Culture

By Andreas PlatthausEr prägte das von Walter Gropius gegründete Bauhaus, dem er als einziger Meister vom ersten bis zum letzten Tag angehörte – von 1919 bis zur Auflösung durch die Nationalsozialisten 1933 –, wie kaum ein Zweiter. Mit seinen Freunden Paul Klee und Wassily Kandinsky revolutionierte er die Kunst. Später wurde er so populär und von der Alltagskultur eingemeindet, dass man Bilder von ihm als Plakate bei einem großen schwedischen Möbelhaus kaufen konnte: Lyonel Feininger. 1871 in New York geboren, hielt er sich von seinem siebzehnten Lebensjahr an fast ein halbes Jahrhundert lang in Deutschland auf. Den Großteil dieser Zeit verbrachte er in Berlin, wo sich auch die rätselhaftesten Episoden seines Lebens abspielten. Warum blieb er, obwohl als "feindlicher Ausländer" registriert, während des Ersten Weltkriegs? Und warum verließ er, obwohl mit einer Jüdin verheiratet und Vater dreier Söhne, Nazi-Deutschland erst 1937? In der Persönlichkeit des Malers spiegelt sich das Dilemma einer doppelten Exil-Existenz im 20. Jahrhundert.Andreas Platthaus, der für dieses Buch zahlreiche Archivbestände auswerten konnte, erzählt das Leben eines Mannes, der sich im steten Zwiespalt zwischen amerikanischem und deutschem Selbstverständnis befand.Hardcover448 pagesText in GermanRowohlt Berlinm, 20215.7 x 8.6 inchesISBN 9783737101165Biography

Lyonel Feininger - Porträt eines Lebens

Von Margret GreinerEmilie Flöge lernte als junges Mädchen Gustav Klimt kennen und führte mit ihm ein Leben lang eine Beziehung jenseits aller Konventionen. Vor allem aber war sie eine herausragende Modeschöpferin. Im Wien um 1900, wo Malerei, Architektur, Kunsthandwerk und Mode eine Blütezeit erlebten, schuf Emilie Flöge einen bahnbrechenden Mode-Stil, der die Frauen – fünfzehn Jahre vor Coco Chanel – von Korsett und Mieder befreite. Paperback303 SeitanKremayr & Scheriau, 20164.65 x 0.94 x 7.36 inchesISBN 9783442714131 Literature

Auf Freiheit zugeschnitten: Emilie Flöge: Modeschöpferin und Gefährtin Gustav Klimts

By Stuart Jeffries “An engaging and accessible history of the lives and main ideas of the leading thinkers of the Frankfurt School.”—The New York Review of Books“This seemingly daunting book turned out to be an exhilarating page-turner . . . Grand Hotel Abyss is an outstanding critical introduction to some of the most fertile, and still relevant, thinkers of the 20th century.”—Michael Dirda, Washington Post“Jeffries moves swiftly across the decades, retracing the jagged paths from the official founding of the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt in June 1924, through its years in exile in New York in the ’30s and Los Angeles in the ’40s and its hasty return to Frankfurt in the early postwar years, up to the work of Horkheimer and Adorno’s prized protégé Jürgen Habermas and the Institute’s legacy today.”—Noah Isenberg, Bookforum Grand Hotel Abyss combines biography, philosophy, and storytelling to reveal how a group of German thinkers, the Frankfurt School, redefined the twentieth century and our own times. Among the most prominent members of what became the Frankfurt School were the philosophers Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse. By taking popular culture seriously as an object of study—whether it was film, music, ideas, or consumerism—the Frankfurt School elaborated upon the nature and crisis of our mass-produced, mechanized society. Grand Hotel Abyss shows how much these ideas still tell us about our age of social media and runaway consumption. Paperback336 pagesVerso, 20175.1 x 1.3 x 7.6 inchesISBN 9781784785697Biography, Philosophy

Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School

By Lydia FlemTranslated by Susan Fairfield The world knows Freud as a thinker—one of the founding giants of modern culture. Now Lydia Flem paints a unique and unforgettable portrait of Freud the man: a father, husband, and friend, a secular Jew with passion for classical antiquity and European culture, torn between his need to be fully accepted in an anti-Semitic society while remaining faithful to his origins.Flem enters into the depths of Freud's creativity, showing how his thinking is connected to his immersion in the arts, the history of religions, and mythology. The intimate details of his daily life, his relationships with women, his poetic gifts, his travels, his dreams, his letters to family, friends, and colleagues: all reveal his vision of the unconscious. We accompany Freud on his walks through Vienna and Rome; look over his shoulder as he writes to his fiancee; learn the significance of the Greek, Roman, and Egyptian figurines that stand before him on his desk as he conceives his groundbreaking ideas; and discover the books, read in childhood, that later shape his self-analysis and his theoretical development. Paperback220 pagesOther Press, 20146 x 0.6 x 9 inchesISBN 9781590517338Biography

Freud the Man: an Intellectual Biography

By Peter Gay "Brilliant.…A dazzling performance.…Gay's ability to integrate into a coherent whole the vast published and unpublished literature on Freud including hundreds of previously unknown or inaccessible letters is awesome.…A work of art."—Jonathan Sharp, San Francisco Examiner-Chronicle"Intelligent and wholly absorbing.…Judicious, original biography, scrupulously grounded in close readings of [Freud's] work."—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times"Elegant…puts Freud's life into the context of his time while attempting to explain him for readers who cannot escape his shadow. In Gay's hands, the Olympian figure is almost within mortal reach."—Michael Skube, Raleigh News and Observer A New York Times bestseller, this is the most highly regarded biography of Freud ever written. To read this book is to enter the world of Sigmund Freud as never before: his family, his city, his professional struggles, his long fruitful and embattled life. Drawing on a vast store of unpublished documents, including hundreds of hitherto unknown or inaccessible letters, Peter Gay deals frankly with the controversies that have long swirled around Freud's impassioned friendships, his love life, and his theoretical innovations which, as Freud himself put it, agitated the sleep of mankind. Paperback864 pagesW.W. Norton & Co., 20066.2 x 1.6 x 9.2 inchesISBN 9780393328615Biography, Psychology

Freud: A Life For Our Time

By Sigmund Freud and Lou Andreas-SaloméEdited by Ernst PfeifferTranslated by William Robson-Scott and Elaine Robson-Scott Lou Andreas-Salomé (1861-1937) was a writer and disciple of Freud who became a practicing analyst. For over two decades she and Freud kept up an intensive correspondence. Freud found in her a perceptive appreciator and amplifier of his ideas, and Frau Andreas found him a sympathetic critic of her own. Their exchanges on theoretical topics and clinical experiences, their admiring friendship, and the glimpses of their personalities makes this collection invaluable for readers interested in the history of psychoanalysis. Lou Andreas-Salomé wrote her first letter to Freud in 1912, asking his permission to come to Vienna for psychoanalytical training. This extraordinary Russian woman, whose intelligence and beauty captivated Nietzsche and Rilke, now captivated Freud, while she discovered in Freud's psychoanalysis the true fulfillment of her life. Freud's letters contain revealing commentaries on his working methods, his conception of narcissism, and his interpretation of Moses, and they treat the themes that preoccupied him in old age: death, religion, war. Frau Andreas's topics include her relationship to Rilke, and her reaction to his death, and the psychology of the artist. The book includes an introduction and notes by Ernst Pfeiffer, Lou Andreas-Salomé's literary executor. Paperback264 pagesW. W. Norton & Company, 19855.3 x 0.6 x 7.8 inchesISBN 9780393302615Biography, Psychology

Sigmund Freud and Lou Andreas-Salomé: Letters

By Fiona MacCarthy “This is an absolute triumph—ideas, lives, and the dramas of the twentieth century are woven together in a feat of storytelling. A masterpiece."—Edmund de Waal, ceramic artist and author of The White Road The impact of Walter Gropius can be measured in his buildings—Fagus Factory, Bauhaus Dessau, Pan Am—but no less in his students. I. M. Pei, Paul Rudolph, Anni Albers, Philip Johnson, Fumihiko Maki: countless masters were once disciples at the Bauhaus in Berlin and at Harvard. Between 1910 and 1930, Gropius was at the center of European modernism and avant-garde society glamor, only to be exiled to the antimodernist United Kingdom during the Nazi years. Later, under the democratizing influence of American universities, Gropius became an advocate of public art and cemented a starring role in twentieth-century architecture and design. Fiona MacCarthy challenges the image of Gropius as a doctrinaire architectural rationalist, bringing out the visionary philosophy and courage that carried him through a politically hostile age. Pilloried by Tom Wolfe as inventor of the monolithic high-rise, Gropius is better remembered as inventor of a form of art education that influenced schools worldwide. He viewed argument as intrinsic to creativity. Unusually for one in his position, Gropius encouraged women’s artistic endeavors and sought equal romantic partners. Though a traveler in elite circles, he objected to the cloistering of beauty as “a special privilege for the aesthetically initiated.” Gropius offers a poignant and personal story—and a fascinating reexamination of the urges that drove European and American modernism.Hardcover560 pages | 50 photosBelknap Press, 20196.25 x 9.25 inchesISBN 9780674737853Biography, Bauhaus

Gropius: The Man Who Built the Bauhaus

By George GroszTranslated by Nora Hodges "George Grosz's autobiography is here translated in a version that restores its bite, verve and sardonic humor. . . . It's a brilliant autobiography, masterfully written, shot through with poetry, filled with sharp observations."—Publishers Weekly This acclaimed autobiography by one of the twentieth century's greatest satirical artists is as much a graphic portrait of Germany in chaos after the Treaty of Versailles as it is a memoir of a remarkable artist's development. Grosz's account of a world gone mad is as acute and provocative as the art that depicts it, and this translation of a work long out of print restores the spontaneity, humor, and energy of the author's German text. It also includes a chapter on Grosz's experience in the Soviet Union—omitted from the original English-language edition—as well as more writings about his twenty-year self-imposed exile in America, and a fable written in English.Paperback325 pagesUniversity of California Press, 1998Originally published in 19469.1 x 5.8 x 0.8 inchesISBN 9780520213272Autobiography, Artist Monograph, Illustration, Drawings

George Grosz: An Autobiography

By Hermann HesseTranslated by Basil Creighton "For all its savagely articulate descriptions of torment and isolation, it is most eloquent about something less glamorous but far more important: healing."—The GuardianWith its blend of Eastern mysticism and Western culture, Hesse’s best-known and most autobiographical work is one of literature’s most poetic evocations of the soul’s journey to liberation.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 bourgeois values he despises. His life changes dramatically when he meets a woman who is his opposite, the carefree and elusive Hermine. The tale of the Steppenwolf culminates in the surreal Magic Theater—For Madmen Only!Originally published in English in 1929, Steppenwolf ’s wisdom continues to speak to our souls and marks it as a classic of modern literature. Also available in German. Paperback224 pagesPicador Publishing, 2002Originally published in 1927ISBN 9780312278670Autobiographical Fiction

Steppenwolf

Edited with text by Nicholas Sawicki and Marie Rakušanová Preface by Zuzana Jürgens Text by Alexander Klee, Marek Nekula, and Miroslav Halak Journey through Kafka’s Prague and discover the art, architecture, media and performances that influenced the author’s oeuvre What did Franz Kafka see and do, whom did he meet and what did he read while roaming the streets of Prague? Through the Eyes of Franz Kafka brings the world of turn-of-the-century Czechoslovakia and its cultural milieu to life. The author’s home city was a heterogeneous and multilingual metropolis whose visual environment shaped his everyday experiences, from local painting and sculpture to architecture, monuments and popular visual media including advertisements, photography and cabaret. Kafka’s attention to the modern visual culture of his era was reflected in his writings and in his interest in drawing, a practice in which he received preliminary training and which he took up in his free time during his years as a university student. This illustrated publication immerses us in Kafka’s world; by following in his footsteps and looking through his eyes, we gain a new understanding of his thoughts, philosophies and inspirations. Hardcover224 pages | 231 color and 16 tri-tone IllustrationsKant, 20258.25 x 11.25 inchesISBN 9788074374265Exhibition Catalogue, Biography

Through the Eyes of Franz Kafka: Between Image and Language

Written and Illustrated by Nicolas MahlerTranslated by Alexander Booth "If you are Nicolas Mahler, the writer and illustrator of a short but engaging graphic biography of the man, you’d see [Kafka] as a sort of blob of hair and eyebrows on a stick. The illustrations of Completely Kafka may look rudimentary, but they work. In fact they’re similar in style to the doodles Kafka himself would make in his notebooks."—Spectator "Much the best thing about the book are the charming black and white drawings. The best are the drawings of Kafka himself, drawn in thick brushstroke. Some are like cartoons, a few are more like Kafka’s own drawings, angular, isolated."—Jewish Chronicle A delightfully witty and original graphic biography of Kafka, published to coincide with the centenary of the author’s death The young Franz Kafka has too many fears to name. Mirrors, clothing, his own body, almost everything causes him to fret. How did this ‘anxious and small bundle of bones’ become one of the world’s great writers? With telling details and sharply minimal illustrations, Nicolas Mahler tells a wickedly funny story of the development of Kafka’s genius, offering a tribute that is as playful as it is profound. Paperback128 pages Pushkin Press, 20245.35 x 8.44 inchesISBN 9781805331582Biography, Historic Graphic Novel

Completely Kafka: A Comic Biography

Original Price: $45.00 UP TO 20% ADDITIONAL SAVINGS FOR MEMBERS Signed copies from translator Ross Benjamin are available. This book was featured as part of our Literatur Café series. By Franz Kafka Translated by Ross Benjamin “Essential . . . The new volume, in a sensitive and briskly idiomatic translation by Ross Benjamin, offers revelation upon revelation. It’s an invaluable addition to Kafka’s oeuvre.”—The New York Times “Franz Kafka’s inner life has always been a bit of a mystery. The expurgated diaries in their original German and English versions hinted at his complicated, often confused relationship to sex, politics, illness, and being Jewish. This readable new translation of the complete German version of the diary transforms the silent Kafka of a century ago into a Kafka not only of his times but of ours.”—Sander Gilman, author of Franz Kafka, The Jewish PatientAn essential new translation of the author’s complete, uncensored diaries—a revelation of the idiosyncrasies and rough edges of one of the twentieth century’s most influential writers.Dating from 1909 to 1923, the handwritten diaries contain various kinds of writing: accounts of daily events, reflections, observations, literary sketches, drafts of letters, accounts of dreams, as well as finished stories. This volume makes available for the first time in English a comprehensive reconstruction of the diary entries and provides substantial new content, including details, names, literary works, and passages of a sexual nature that were omitted from previous publications. By faithfully reproducing the diaries’ distinctive—and often surprisingly unpolished—writing in Kafka’s notebooks, translator Ross Benjamin brings to light not only the author’s use of the diaries for literary experimentation and private self-expression, but also their value as a work of art in themselves.Hardcover704 pagesSchocken, 20236.2 x 9.25 inchesISBN 9780805243550Literature, Kafka

The Diaries of Franz Kafka

By Reiner StachTranslated by Shelley Frisch One of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 2017Longlisted for the 2017 National Translation Award, American Literary Translators Association"Stach's book crowns a definitive biographical trilogy 18 years in the making...Kafka: The Early Years, along with its two siblings—all three volumes impeccably translated from the German by Shelley Frisch—often feels like biography plotted as a novel. Stach's relish for detail is marshaled to the sensibility—if not the omniscience or imaginative license—of the novelist...[T]he heft of Stach's research is balanced by interpretive tact and a discerning eye."—Benjamin Balint, Wall Street JournalThis is the acclaimed central volume of the definitive biography of Franz Kafka. Reiner Stach spent more than a decade working with over four thousand pages of journals, letters, and literary fragments, many never before available, to re-create the atmosphere in which Kafka lived and worked from 1910 to 1915, the most important and best-documented years of his life. This period, which would prove crucial to Kafka's writing and set the course for the rest of his life, saw him working with astonishing intensity on his most seminal writings—The Trial, "The Metamorphosis", The Man Who Disappeared (Amerika), and "The Judgment." These are also the years of Kafka's fascination with Zionism; of his tumultuous engagement to Felice Bauer; and of the outbreak of World War I.Kafka: The Decisive Years is at once an extraordinary portrait of the writer and a startlingly original contribution to the art of literary biography.Reiner Stach worked extensively on the definitive edition of Kafka's collected works before embarking on this three-volume biography. The third volume, Kafka: The Years of Insight (Princeton), covering Kafka's final years, is also available. The first volume, covering Kafka's childhood and youth, is forthcoming.Paperback 624 pages | 37 halftonesPrinceton University Press, 2013ISBN 9780691147413Biography, Nonfiction

Kafka: The Decisive Years [Paperback]

Original Price: $35 UP TO 20% ADDITIONAL SAVINGS FOR MEMBERS By Diethard Leopold In the 1950s, as the world continued to recover from war and artists were grappling with new conditions in striking new ways, Rudolf Leopold (1925–2010) achieved something impressive: he built up a large, aesthetically sophisticated and historically relevant art collection of international renown. This book draws on the memories of Leopold’s son, Diethard, to tell Leopold’s story, presenting him as a fascinating collector. It shows how Leopold, beginning his collection around a core of works by Egon Schiele, branched out to collect major works by Klimt, Kokoschka, Gerstl, Egger-Lienz, and Kubin, as well as by German expressionists—thus bringing together a representative grouping of the key artists of the period.Hardcover320 pagesHirmer Publishers, 20186.5 x 1.1 x 9.2 inchesISBN 9783777428673Biography, Art History, Museum Studies

Rudolf Leopold

By Claire Beck LoosTranslated by Constance C. Pontasch and Nicholas Saunders "Claire [Beck Loos]'s book reveals a sharp eye for capturing personality, story and zeitgeist."―Stewart Oksenhorn, Arts Editor, Aspen Times"A valuable fine-grained portrait…The English translation of her book is fluent and accurate, conveying well the tone of Claire Loos’ original (which, in turn, to some extent mimics Loos’ own writing style). Richly informative."―Christopher Long, West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture"Claire Beck Loos, a gifted photographer and writer…reveals much about her ex-husband’s mercurial persona in a series of conversationally-toned vignettes….Claire died tragically at 38, at the Riga concentration camp; her memoir thus becomes a haunting tribute not only to Loos's talents, but to her own..."―Judy Pollan, Modernism Magazine Adolf Loos—A Private Portrait is an unusual, literary biography featuring lively, often humorous, “snapshots” of Viennese-Czechoslovak architect Adolf Loos. An intimate collection of vignettes reveal Loos’ personality, temperament and philosophy during the last years of his life (1929-1933) and the ways in which he helped shape Modern architecture. This translation, by Constance C. Pontasch and Nicholas Saunders, is the first English edition.The author, Claire Beck Loos, was a photographer and Adolf Loos’ last wife. She was born in 1904 in Czechoslovakia; her family were Jewish industrialists and important early clients of Loos, commissioning several apartments in Pilsen and works by the architect’s friend Oskar Kokoschka. In addition to being a biography of her husband, Adolf Loos—A Private Portrait also serves as a self-portrait of Claire, a vibrant young artist who died a tragic and untimely death at Riga, a Nazi concentration camp, in 1942. The book includes supplemental texts by Claire’s niece Janet Beck Wilson, biographical materials and previously unpublished artistic photographs by the author. Hardcover200 pagesDoppelHouse Press, 2011 1.8 x 1 x 7.1 inchesISBN 9780983254003Biography, Architecture

Adolf Loos — A Private Portrait

By James Reidel "A remarkable book, Manon’s World brilliantly evokes an extraordinary set of individuals in an urgent time and place: Austria during and after the First World War. Reidel’s sure hand weaves together the stories of the people surrounding and interacting with Manon. The result is a dazzling narrative that transports us to a lost world peopled by some of the remarkable characters in recent history. A story so compelling it is hard to put down."―Mary Dearborn, biographer and authorManon Gropius (1916–1935) was the daughter of Alma Mahler, the widow of Gustav Mahler, and the architect Walter Gropius, the founder of the Bauhaus, and the stepdaughter of the writer Franz Werfel. In Manon’s World, James Reidel explores the life and death of a child at the center of a broken love triangle. The story takes a unique course, describing a peripheral figure but in a context where her significance and centrality in the lives of her famous parents and circles comes into relief. Reidel reveals a neglected and fascinating life in a world gone by—Vienna, Venice, and Berlin of the interwar years. Not just a narrative biography, Manon’s World is also a medical history of the polio that killed Manon and a personal cultural history of the aspirations projected on her—and seen as lost by such keen observers as Elias Canetti, who devoted two chapters of his Nobel Prize–winning memoirs to his encounters with Manon and her funeral. That event led Alban Berg to dedicate his signature Violin Concerto “to an angel.” Reidel reveals a more complex image of a young woman who desired to be an actress and artist in her own right despite being her mother’s intended protégé, an inspiration to her father who rarely saw her, and her stepfather Franz Werfel, who obsessively wrote her into his novels, beginning with The Forty Days of Musa Dagh and as a revenant in all the books that followed.Hardcover324 pages | 10 halftonesSeagull Books, 20216 x 9 x 1.2 inchesISBN 9780857427496Biography

Manon's World: A Hauntology of a Daughter in the Triangle of Alma Mahler, Walter Gropius and Franz Werfel

Original Price: $35.00 UP TO 20% ADDITIONAL SAVINGS FOR MEMBERS By Stanley CorngoldA unique look at Thomas Mann’s intellectual and political transformation during the crucial years of his exile in the United States.In September 1938, Thomas Mann, the Nobel Prize–winning author of Death in Venice and The Magic Mountain, fled Nazi Germany for the United States. Heralded as “the greatest living man of letters,” Mann settled in Princeton, New Jersey, where, for nearly three years, he was stunningly productive as a novelist, university lecturer, and public intellectual. In The Mind in Exile, Stanley Corngold portrays in vivid detail this crucial station in Mann’s journey from arch-European conservative to liberal conservative to ardent social democrat.On the knife-edge of an exile that would last fully fourteen years, Mann declared, “Where I am, there is Germany. I carry my German culture in me.” At Princeton, Mann nourished an authentic German culture that he furiously observed was “going to the dogs” under Hitler. Here, he wrote great chunks of his brilliant novel Lotte in Weimar (The Beloved Returns); the witty novella The Transposed Heads; and the first chapters of Joseph the Provider, which contain intimations of his beloved President Roosevelt’s economic policies. Each of Mann’s university lectures—on Goethe, Freud, Wagner—attracted nearly 1,000 auditors, among them the baseball catcher, linguist, and O.S.S. spy Moe Berg. Meanwhile, Mann had the determination to travel throughout the United States, where he delivered countless speeches in defense of democratic values.In Princeton, Mann exercised his “stupendous capacity for work” in a circle of friends, all highly accomplished exiles, including Hermann Broch, Albert Einstein, and Erich Kahler. The Mind in Exile portrays this luminous constellation of intellectuals at an extraordinary time and place.Hardcover280 pagesPrinceton University Press, 20226.5 x 1 x 9.5 inchesISBN 9780691229676Literary Theory, Biography

The Mind in Exile: Thomas Mann in Princeton [Hardcover]

Original Price: $25.00 UP TO 20% ADDITIONAL SAVINGS FOR MEMBERS Durchgesehener Neusatz bearbeitet und eingerichtet von Michael Holzinger. Please note that Rare/Out-of-Print titles are very limited in stock. Paperback184 pagesText in GermanCreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 20146 x 0.4 x 9 inchesISBN 9783743723504Letters

Briefwechsel 1910 – 1914

By Stefan Zweig Translated by Eden Paul and Cedar Paul From the moment of her birth to her death on the scaffold, Mary Stuart spent her life embroiled in power struggles that shook the foundations of Renaissance Europe. Revered by some as the rightful Queen of England, reviled by others as a murderous adulteress, her long and fascinating rivalry with her cousin Elizabeth I led ultimately to her downfall.Zweig, one of the most popular writers of the twentieth century, brings Mary to life and turns her tale into a story of passion and plotting as gripping as any novel. Paperback448 pagesPushkin Press, 2018Originally published in 19355.1 x 1.1 x 7.8 inchesISBN 9781782275459Biography, History

Mary Queen of Scots

By Marissa Moss "A brief comic book style episode introduces each chapter making an effective attention-grabber and a boon to report writers."—The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books "Moss presents a spectacular story of history, science, and women’s struggle for respect through the narrative of Meitner’s life. The writing style is captivating and the book is a quick page-turner."—School Library Journal"Absorbing and well-paced. . .Moss provides readers with comprehensible descriptions of her subject’s scientific work."—The Horn Book MagazineBestselling author-illustrator Marissa Moss tells the gripping story of Lise Meitner, the physicist who discovered nuclear fission.As a female Jewish physicist in Berlin during the early 20th century, Lise Meitner had to fight for an education, a job, and equal treatment in her field, like having her name listed on her own research papers.Meitner made groundbreaking strides in the study of radiation, but when Hitler came to power in Germany, she suddenly had to face not only sexism, but also life-threatening anti-Semitism as well. Nevertheless, she persevered and one day made a discovery that rocked the world: the splitting of the atom. While her male lab partner was awarded a Nobel Prize for the achievement, the committee refused to give her any credit.Suddenly, the race to build the atomic bomb was on—although Meitner was horrified to be associated with such a weapon. “A physicist who never lost her humanity,” Meitner wanted only to figure out how the world works, and advocated for pacifism while others called for war.The book includes an afterword, author's note, timeline, select terms of physics, glossary of scientists mentioned, endnotes, select bibliography, index, and Marissa Moss’s celebrated drawings throughout. The Woman Who Split the Atom is a fascinating look at Meitner’s fierce passion, integrity, and her lifelong struggle to have her contributions to physics recognized.Hardcover264 pagesAge range: 10-14 yearsAbrams Books for Young Readers, 20225.85 x 8.3 inchesISBN 9781419758539Teen Literature, Women Historical Non-Fiction

The Woman Who Split the Atom: The Life of Lise Meitner

By Eric Torgersen "It was not until I read Requiem for a Friend in Eric Torgersen's translation that I understood what a great and tragic poem it is: guilt-ridden, impassioned, intimate, a sublimated howl. Torgersen's version is one of those rare complete successes in the absolutely impossible art of translation."—Galway Kinnell"A brilliant and valuable study, written with grace and passion, Torgesen's work could scarcely be bettered, both for the delight of reading it provides and for the insights into the lives it exposes."—Choice"As a guide through the intersecting lives and relevant work of Rilke, Modersohn-Becker, and Westhoff, this study has qualitatively and in its focus no parallel in either English or German."—Reinhold Heller, University of ChicagoIn 1908, Rainer Maria Rilke wrote Requiem for a Friend in memory of Paula Moderson-Becker, the German painter who had profoundly affected him and who had died a year earlier. Although one of the great modern painters, Modersohn-Becker is remembered primarily as she is portrayed in Rilke's poem. Dear Friend looks at the relationship of two great artists whose often-strained friendship was extraordinarily productive for both. Paperback 276 pagesNorthwestern University Press, 20006 x 0.8 x 9 inchesISBN 9780810118195Biography, Letters, Poetry

Dear Friend: Rainer Maria Rilke and Paula Modersohn-Becker

This book was featured in our Lecture Series. Translated by Ulrich Baer from the collection edited by Rainer StammIntroduction by Jill LloydThe painter Paula Modersohn-Becker and the poet Rainer Maria Rilke were two of the most talented and original creative artists at work in early twentieth-century Europe. They enjoyed a close friendship that left in its wake a remarkable series of letters. Encompassing topics such as art, literature, and the nature of marriage, their correspondence testifies to both writers’ brilliant descriptive gifts and penetrating social intelligence. Brought together in English for the first time, the letters that Modersohn-Becker and Rilke sent to one another provide a fascinating view of everyday life during an exceptionally fertile and exciting period of cultural production.Paperback120 pagesEris Press, 20247.8 x 5.1 inchesISBN 9781916809901Biography, Correspondence, Art History

The Modersohn-Becker/Rilke Correspondence

By Patrick Mackie “Erudite, ambitious and elegantly written . . . Mackie’s assertions about the ways Mozart’s identification with his era come through in the music are intriguing and insightful . . . His writing is fresh and imaginative, showing feeling for the musical character and dramatic narrative of a piece.” —Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times Book Review “Mackie’s approach is to situate the composer as an avatar of modernism, facing a fragmented high culture—caught between dry, ritualized forms of courtly music and the ‘hedonistic levity’ betokened by Enlightenment individualism. By laying such tensions bare, Mackie achieves for Mozart what Mozart himself did for music, time and time again: to make the old new, and intelligible as such.” —Robert Erickson, The New Criterion In exhilarating, transformative prose, the poet Patrick Mackie reveals a musician in dialogue with culture at its most sweepingly progressive. Mozart is one of the most familiar and beloved icons of our culture, but how much do we really understand about his music, and what can it reveal to us about the great composer? Following Mozart from his youth in Salzburg to his early death, from his close and rivalrous relationship with his father to his romantic attachments, from his hugely successful operas to intimate compositions on the keyboard, Patrick Mackie leads the reader through the major and lesser-known moments of the composer’s life and brings alive the teeming, swiveling modernity of eighteenth-century Europe. In this era of rococo painting, surrealist aesthetics, and political turbulence, Mozart reckoned with a searing talent that threatened to overwhelm him, all the while pushing himself to extraordinary feats of musicianship. In Mozart in Motion, we are returned to the volatility of the eighteenth century and hear Mozart’s music in all its audacious vividness, gaining fresh perspectives on why his works still move us so intensely today as we continue to search for a modernity he imagined into being. Paperback368 pagesPicador, 20245.65 x 0.95 x 8.7 inchesISBN 9781250335715Biography, Austrian Composer

Mozart in Motion: His Work and His World in Pieces

By Stefan ZweigTranslated by Will StoneCover illustration by David Pearson "Zweig’s accumulated historical and cultural studies remain a body of achievement almost too impressive to take in."—Clive James"[Zweig’s] life and work tell of the perilous flimsiness of our world of security—a message that many insistently deny, but somehow need to hear."—John Gray, New Statesman He who thinks freely for himself, honours all freedom on earth.Stefan Zweig was already an émigré-driven from a Europe torn apart by brutality and totalitarianism-when he found, in a damp cellar, a copy of Michel de Montaigne's Essais. Montaigne would become Zweig's last great occupation, helping him make sense of his own life and his obsessions-with personal freedom, with the sanctity of the individual. Through his writings on suicide, he would also, finally, lead Zweig to his death.With the intense psychological acuity and elegant prose so characteristic of Zweig's fiction, this account of Montaigne's life asks how we ought to think, and how to live. It is an intense and wonderful insight into both subject and biographer. Paperback153 pagesPushkin Press, 2015Originally published in 19854.8 x 0.6 x 6.5 inchesISBN 9781782271031Biography, Philosophy

Montaigne

By Stefan ZweigTranslated by Will Stone "Zweig’s accumulated historical and cultural studies [are] almost too impressive to take in."—Clive James"Zweig is the most adult of writers: civilized, urbane, but never jaded or cynical; a realist who none the less believe in the possibility—the necessity—of empathy." —Independent"Zweig…deserves to be famous again, and for good."—TLS In this vivid biography, Zweig eschews traditional academic discussion and focuses on Nietzsche’s habits, passions and obsessions. Concentrating on the man rather than the work, on the tragedy of his existence and his apartness from the world in which he moved in enforced isolation, Zweig draws the reader inexorably into Nietzsche’s tragic life.This edition is illustrated with numerous photographs relating to Nietzsche and his European locations, in a superb translation by Will Stone.Paperback128 pages Pushkin Press, 2020Originally published in 19257.8 x 0.3 x 5.1 inchesISBN 9781782276364Biography

Nietzsche

By Friedrich Nietzsche Introduction by Michael TannerTranslated by R.J. HollingdaleIn late 1888, only weeks before his final collapse into madness, Nietzsche (1844-1900) set out to compose his autobiography, and Ecce Homo remains one of the most intriguing yet bizarre examples of the genre ever written. In this extraordinary work Nietzsche traces his life, work and development as a philosopher, examines the heroes he has identified with, struggled against and then overcome—Schopenhauer, Wagner, Socrates, Christ—and predicts the cataclysmic impact of his ‘forthcoming revelation of all values’. Both self-celebrating and self-mocking, penetrating and strange, Ecce Homo gives the final, definitive expression to Nietzsche’s main beliefs and is in every way his last testament.Paperback122 pages Penguin, 2004Originally published in 19087 x 0.3 x 10 inches ISBN 9780140445152Autobiographical, Philosophy, Existentialism

Ecce Homo

By Katharina Rich Perlow At various times throughout her adult life in the United States, Katharina Rich Perlow was asked how her family survived World War II in Vienna, Austria. She was reluctant to conjure up the harrowing events of her childhood—until now. As the number of Jewish survivors of the Holocaust diminishes rapidly, and for the sake of her children and grandchildren, Katharina felt compelled to tell her story. Her memoir is the story of six-year-old Katharina, her two older siblings, her Catholic mother and her Jewish father, forcibly moved from a quiet, small-town life into a tiny apartment in the heart of wartime, working-class Vienna. It is the story of her soon-to-be widowed mother trying desperately to conceal from neighbors the secret that meant the difference between life and death. Despite being deprived of all the normal hallmarks of childhood, including school, social life, and even food, Katharina tells her story from the point of view of the energetic, curious, and insightful girl that she was, and the woman she was to become. From learning to dance the waltz in her tiny kitchen, to hiding in the catacombs during the Allied bombing, this is a story of bravery, family sacrifice, and survival under the most horrific of circumstances—and ultimately, of hope and resilience. Paperback202 pagesWalter Press, 20146 x 0.5 x 9 inchesISBN 9780615926292Memoir, Biography, Austrian History

Obstructed View: A Memoir of a Young Girl Growing Up in Wartime Vienna

By Marjorie Perloff "One of our finest critics and a tireless advocate for the avant-garde….To have this memoir now is a boon."—Andrew DuBois, Harvard ReviewA fascinating memoir of refugee flight and survival, intellectual yet highly personal, by one America's eminent literary critics.The Vienna Paradox is Marjorie Perloff's memoir of growing up in pre-World War II Vienna, her escape to America in 1938 with her upper-middle-class, highly cultured, and largely assimilated Jewish family, and her self-transformation from the German-speaking Gabriele Mintz to the English-speaking Marjorie—who also happened to be the granddaughter of Richard Schüller, the Austrian foreign minister under Chancellor Dollfuss and a special delegate to the League of Nations. Compelling as the story is, this is hardly a conventional memoir. Rather, it interweaves biographical anecdote and family history with speculations on the historical development of early 20th-century Vienna as it was experienced by her parents' generation, and how the loss of their "high" culture affected the lives of these cultivated refugees in a democratic United States that was, and remains, deeply suspicious of perceived "elitism." This is, in other words, an intellectual memoir, both elegant and heartfelt, by one of America's leading critics, a narrative in which literary and philosophical reference is as central as the personal. Paperback224 pagesNew Directions, 20045.2 x 0.8 x 8 inchesISBN 9780811215718Memoir, Biography, Austrian History

The Vienna Paradox: A Memoir

Original Price: $49.95 UP TO 20% ADDITIONAL SAVINGS FOR MEMBERS Von Margret GreinerLeidenschaft für die Wiener Werkstätte!Glanz und Elend, Erfolg und Ruin: Die packende Geschichte der Primavesi-Frauen zwischen Olmütz, Wien und Montréal – zwei Leben für die Kunst.Mäda Primavesi senior und junior waren selbstbestimmte, eigenwillige Frauen, der Kunst und dem Kunstgewerbe verschrieben. Gustav Klimt hat sie beide porträtiert. Die Mutter wagt sich, nachdem sich ihr Mann Otto ruiniert hatte, selbst in die Unternehmensführung der Werkstätte, wirft ihre Person und ihr Vermögen in die Waagschale. Die Tochter geht eigene Wege, widmet sich ebenfalls dem Kunstgewerbe, wandert nach dem 2. Weltkrieg aus, verbindet die Liebe zu Kindern mit erfolgreicher Gründung und Führung eines Kinderheims in Kanada. Die Primavesis – zwei außergewöhnliche Frauen, die ihrer Zeit voraus waren. Hardcover304 SeitenText in GermanKremayr & Scheriau, 20235 1/3 x 8 1/2 InchesISBN 9783218013048Biografie, Wiener Werkstätte

Mäda & Mäda: Gustav Klimt, die Wiener Werkstätte und die Familie Primavesi

By Rachel Corbett Winner of the Marfield Prize for Arts Writing, 2016 “[An] empathetic and imaginative biography, deeply researched.”―The New Yorker "You Must Change Your Life is an enthralling exploration of the complex relationship between two creative giants of art and literature, drawn together in Paris at the birth of a new century...Corbett...sustains the reader’s interest through intellectual rigour, elegance, and above all empathy."—The London Magazine "...she [Rachel Corbett] evokes the interaction between Rodin's and Rilke's circumstances and mental states in vivid detail...The result of her efforts is a beautiful exercise in compact, interwoven double biography."—Times Literary Supplement In 1902, Rainer Maria Rilke―then a struggling poet in Germany―went to Paris to research and write a short book about the sculptor Auguste Rodin. The two were almost polar opposites: Rilke in his twenties, delicate and unknown; Rodin in his sixties, carnal and revered. Yet they fell into an instantaneous friendship―and before long Rodin hired Rilke as his secretary. With verve and great insight, Corbett transports readers to turn-of-the-twentieth-century Paris to explore this surprising friendship and the development of their influential ideas about art and creativity. She captures the dawn of modernism with appearances by such charismatic figures as Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, Isadora Duncan, George Bernard Shaw, and Jean Cocteau, as well as the rise of the concept of “empathy” amid the pioneering work of Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and Georg Simmel. Corbett also introduces the women in these men’s lives, many of them esteemed writers and artists in their own right: Rodin’s muse Camille Claudel, Rilke’s wife and fellow artist Clara Westhoff, and the remarkable Lou Andreas-Salome, who was Nietzsche’s lover and Rilke’s lifelong friend. You Must Change Your Life is a vibrant portrait of Rilke and Rodin’s singular friendship, heartbreaking rift, and moving reconciliation, and it is a testament to the ways their work continues to reverberate to this day. Paperback320 pagesW. W. Norton & Company, 20175.6 x 0.9 x 8.3 inchesISBN 9780393354928Biography, Art

You Must Change Your Life: The Story of Rainer Maria Rilke and Auguste Rodin [Paperback]

By Joseph RothTranslated by Michael Hofmann “Hofmann... makes a worthy Virgil through the inferno on display in these pages... Part of the pleasure of reading Joseph Roth—the novels, stories, journalism, letters all—lies in his synthesis of an easily acquired street sapience with a hard-won erudition. He has a 19th-century aesthetic molested by 20th-century crimes, a dignified formalism perverted by an absurdist undertow. Modernity for Roth is a hideous prank played on us by the angel of history."—William Giraldi, Commentary Magazine “Reading Joseph Roth: A Life in Letters is like sitting across a café table from Roth himself... No standard biography of Roth exists in English, but this collection of his letters, superbly translated and judiciously edited by long-time Roth advocate Michael Hofmann, provides a more intimate portrait than any biography could.”—Roger Boylan, Boston ReviewThe monumentality of this biographical work further establishes Joseph Roth—with Kafka, Mann, and Musil—in the twentieth-century literary canon.Who would have thought that seventy-three years after Joseph Roth’s lonely death in Paris, new editions of his translations would be appearing regularly? Roth, a transcendent novelist who also produced some of the most breathtakingly lyrical journalism ever written, is now being discovered by a new generation. Nine years in the making, this life through letters provides us with our most extensive portrait of Roth’s calamitous life—his father’s madness, his wife’s schizophrenia, his parade of mistresses (each more exotic than the next), and his classic westward journey from a virtual Hapsburg shtetl to Vienna, Berlin, Frankfurt, and finally Paris.Containing 457 newly translated letters, along with eloquent introductions that richly frame Roth’s life, this book brilliantly evokes the crumbling specters of the Weimar Republic and 1930s France. Displaying Roth’s ceaselessly inventive powers, it finally charts his descent into despair at a time when “the word had died, [and] men bark like dogs.”Hardcover512 pages W. W. Norton & Company; 1st Edition edition, 20126.7 x 1.8 x 9.6 inchesISBN 9780393060645Biography, Letters

Joseph Roth: A Life in Letters

By Meriel Schindler An extraordinary memoir of a Jewish family spanning two world wars and its flight from Nazi-occupied Austria. Meriel Schindler spent her adult life trying to keep her father, Kurt, at bay. But when he died in 2017, he left behind piles of Nazi-era documents related to her family’s fate in Innsbruck, Austria, and a treasure trove of family albums reaching back to before World War I. Meriel was forced to confront not only their fractured relationship, but also the truth behind their family history. The Lost Café Schindler re-creates the journey of an extraordinary family, whose relatives included the Jewish doctor who treated Hitler’s mother when she was dying of breast cancer; the Kafka family; and Alma Schindler, the wife of Gustav Mahler. The narrative centers around the Café Schindler, the social hub of Innsbruck. Famous for its pastries, home-distilled liquors, live entertainment, and hospitality, the restaurant attracted Austrians from all walks of life. But as conditions became untenable for Jews in Austria during the Nazi era, the Schindlers were forced to leave, and their café was expropriated. Meriel reconstructs the color and vibrancy of life in prewar Innsbruck against the majestic backdrop of the Austrian Alps, as well as the creeping menace and, finally, terror of the Nazi occupation. Ultimately, The Lost Café Schindler is a story of tragic loss—several relatives disappeared in Terezín and Auschwitz—but also one of reclamation and reconciliation. Beautifully written, it is an unforgettable portrait of an era and a testament to the pull of family history on future generations.Hardcover432 pagesW.W. Norton, 20215.04 x 1.18 x 7.72 inchesISBN 9780393881622Austrian History, Memoir

The Lost Café Schindler: One Family, Two Wars, and the Search for Truth

By Daniel Paul SchreberTranslated and Edited by Richard A. Hunter and Ida MacalpineIntroduction by Rosemary Dinnage "[Memoirs of My Nervous Illness examines] what happens when the human mind works in ways that are mysterious even to its owner."—The New Yorker "Schreber is appealing because his writing is loose and vague, full of sex and politics—a kind of information pornography. It fulfills the pleasures of his readers whatever their ideological persuasion."—Giovanni Intra, Bookforum "Since...[its publication in 1903] it’s been widely regarded as the most revelatory subjective account of mental illness ever put forward...This edition, the first for decades, represents a very welcome return to print....To call this epiphanic confession a cross between Hildegard of Bingen and Philip K Dick may demarcate its territory, but it gives little idea of the universe of detail and the evangelical white heat of its sustained visionary narrative. Schreber was undoubtedly barking mad, as we’re reminded by the dry psychiatric reports on his progress, which are included in this volume. But we’re also reminded throughout that barking madness can coexist with a razor-sharp legal mind, astonishing personal courage and a boundless love for humanity."—Mike Jay, Fortean Times, The Journal of Strange Phenomena In 1884, the distinguished German jurist Daniel Paul Schreber suffered the first of a series of mental collapses that would afflict him for the rest of his life. In his madness, the world was revealed to him as an enormous architecture of nerves, dominated by a predatory God. It became clear to Schreber that his personal crisis was implicated in what he called a "crisis in God's realm," one that had transformed the rest of humanity into a race of fantasms. There was only one remedy; as his doctor noted: Schreber "considered himself chosen to redeem the world, and to restore to it the lost state of Blessedness. This, however, he could only do by first being transformed from a man into a woman...."Composed while Schreber was confined to a psychiatric hospital and published at the outset of the twentieth century, Memoirs of My Nervous Illness has fascinated and haunted its many readers, including Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Elias Canetti, and Gilles Deleuze, and has established itself as a key social and cultural history. As Rosemary Dinnage says in her introduction to this new edition, Schreber wrote "an account of what it is to be forsaken by everything familiar and real, and of the delusionary world that gets invented in their place." His book is perhaps the most revealing dispatch ever received from the far side of madness.Paperback496 pagesNYRB Classics, 2000Originally Published in 19038 x 5 x 1.3 inchesISBN 9780940322202Psychology, Memoir

Memoirs of My Nervous Illness

By Mark Berry "Berry’s perspective on the controversy (still) surrounding the composer is clear-eyed, empathetic, and pleasingly free of polemics of its own...Berry's survey of the individual works is comprehensive and exemplary."—BBC Music Magazine"A superb piece of writing: informative, engaging and compact. It wears its considerable research with a winning lightness of touch. The best introduction to the composer."—Thomas Hyde, composer and Lecturer in Music at Worcester College, Oxford"Arnold Schoenberg lived a “critical life” by any standards, and his entry here into the Critical Lives series of compact volumes devoted to leading cultural figures of the modern period is very welcome. No composer has ever earned quite such a bogeyman reputation, one still widely held if concert and opera programming is any evidence, yet for those of us who actively crave the sound of his music there is also the fascination of the figure himself—and a deeply human side of the composer, to which those who knew him still testify."—OperaThe most radical and divisive composer of the twentieth century, Arnold Schoenberg remains a hero to many, and a villain to many others. Born in the Jewish quarter of his beloved Vienna, Schoenberg’s early career took him to Berlin, as a leading light of Weimar culture, before he fled in the dead of night from Hitler’s Third Reich. He found himself in the United States, settling in Los Angeles, where he would inspire composers from George Gershwin to John Cage. Schoenberg’s revolutionary approach to musical composition incorporated Wagnerian late Romanticism and the brave new worlds of atonality and serialism, and it changed the history of music forever.In this refreshingly balanced biography, Mark Berry tells the story of Schoenberg’s life and work within the wider context of nineteenth and twentieth-century history. He also introduces all of Schoenberg’s major musical works, from his very first compositions such as String Quartet in D Major to his invention of the 12-tone method. This book is essential reading for all those with an interest in the music and history of the twentieth century.Paperback240 pagesReaktion Books, 20195 x 0.6 x 7.8 inchesISBN 9781789140873Music, Biography

Arnold Schoenberg

By Bojan Bujic "Includes rare and revealing illustrations...[A] sane and sensitive biography...A readable illustrated biography of Schoenberg is such an obvious idea what one wonders why it has taken so long for one to appear. Certainly Phaidon's 20th Century Composers series [...] is an ideal format...Bojan Bujic [...] has performed his task with skill and sympathy. It is refreshing to see Schoenberg treated as a passionate human being...Bujic's explication of the serial method and its imaginative origins is sensible and concise...He is also ingenious in using his pictorial material to illuminate musical issues...Overall an extremely useful introduction."—BBC Music"The major (and rare) achievement of the book is its slow but sure description of Schoenberg's move through post-romantic tonality, atonality and serialism. The explanation of musical language is always tricky […] but Bujic remains clear and honest without baffling...particularly deft is his invitation to listen to Schoenberg in a different way…Bujic's biography, like its subject, dazzles and delights."—Classical Music Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951) was arguably the central musical personality of the 20th century, whose innovative, uncompromising musical language opened up new possibilities for composers and influenced generations of musicians and listeners. A major force in the development of modern music, Schoenberg is famous for abandoning tonality and introducing the 12-tone 'serial' method of composition. In addition to his groundbreaking work as a composer, Schoenberg was an important theorist and an enormously influential teacher, with Anton Webern and Alban Berg among his most famous pupils. This book presents a clear narrative history of Schoenberg’s life, work and cultural context along with essential reference material and striking illustrations, making it a vital purchase for anyone interested in the composer. Brought up in the rich and cosmopolitan cultural life of Vienna, Schoenberg started to play the violin at the age of nine and began experimenting with composition almost immediately, but had no formal training in music until his late teens. Schoenberg first composed in the late Romantic tradition, and his earliest acknowledged works, including the string sextet 'Verklärte Nacht', date from the turn of the century. Over the next decade in Vienna, he developed his musical style, in due course causing a sensation with the dissonance of his 'serial' technique and the harmonic strangeness and complexity of his material. Hardcover240 pages | 80 black-and-white illustrationsPhaidon Press, 20116.8 x 1 x 9 inchesISBN 9780714846149Biography, Music, Vienna

Original Price: $30 UP TO 20% ADDITIONAL SAVINGS FOR MEMBERS By Judith Chernaik “This densely informative biography also provides a comprehensive listening guide to [Schumann’s] music. . . . For Chernaik, the music illuminates the story of a man with ‘more feeling than judgment,’ who emerged as one of the most influential Romantic composers, before a harrowing descent into madness.”—The New Yorker“Chernaik is an enthusiastic student of Schumann’s music and a fine chronicler of his turbulent life. Schumann: The Faces and the Masks is a well-proportioned, highly readable biography for general readers that establishes Schumann as a man thoroughly of his time. The book’s greatest contribution is to situate Schumann in a remarkable fraternity of 19th-century composers.”—Michael O’Donnell, The Wall Street Journal“Engrossing . . . A most touching and moving story, beautifully told . . . [Chernaik] understands the poetry of Schumann’s soul and she communicates with quiet urgency the pity of his story and the beauty of his music. If her intention was that by reading this, we’d be inspired to go back to his music with a deeper appreciation, it has worked for me.”—Ysenda Maxtone Graham, Daily Mail A groundbreaking account of Robert Schumann, a major composer and key figure of Romanticism, whose life and works have been the subject of intense controversy since his early death in a mental asylum. Schumann: The Faces and the Masks draws us into the milieu of the Romantic movement, which enraptured poets, musicians, painters, and their audiences in the early nineteenth century and beyond, even to the present day. It reveals how Schumann (1810-1856) embodied all the contrasting themes of Romanticism—he was intensely original and imaginative but also worshiped the past; he believed in political, personal, and artistic freedom but insisted on the need for artistic form based on the masters: Bach, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. It details his deep involvement with other composers of his time, such as Chopin and Mendelssohn, Liszt and Brahms, as well as the literary lights of the age––Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Heinrich Heine, E.T.A. Hoffmann—whose works gave inspiration to his compositions and words to his songs. Drawing on hitherto unpublished archive material, as well more established sources of journals, letters, and publications, Judith Chernaik provides enthralling new insight into Schumann's life and his music: his sexual escapades, his fathering of an illegitimate child, the facts behind his courtship of Clara Wieck—already a noted young concert pianist––his passionate marriage to her despite the opposition of her manipulative father, his passionate marriage, and the ways his many crises fed into the dreams and fantasies of his greatest works, turning his tumultuous life into music that speaks directly to the heart. Hardcover349 pagesFaber & Faber, 20186.6 x 1.5 x 9.5 inchesISBN 9780571331260Biography, Music

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