Literary Criticism - European - German

The first English-language biography in over fifty years to tell the full, vibrant story of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, known to history as the Brothers Grimm A New Yorker "Best Book of 2024" - Winner of the Wayland D. Hand Prize, sponsored by the...

'Hans Castorp filled his lungs with the pure mountain air--this fresh, light atmosphere that was so easy to inhale and held no scent of moisture, no content, no memories...' Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain (1924) is a social comedy with tragic overtones, providing a...

The arresting story of how Thomas Mann wrote The Magic Mountain as a defeated Germany descended into political chaos Like many writers of his generation, Thomas Mann (1875-1955) welcomed the outbreak of the First World War. He viewed it as a spiritual necessity, a...

'She sees, coming up a second time, Earth from the ocean, eternally green;the waterfalls plunge, an eagle soars above them, over the mountain hunting fish.' After the terrible conflagration of Ragnarok, the earth rises serenely again from the ocean, and life is renewed. The...

"She sees, coming up a second time, earth from the ocean, eternally green;the waterfalls plunge, an eagle soars above them, over the mountain hunting fish." After the terrible conflagration of Ragnarok, the earth rises serenely again from the ocean, and life is renewed. The...

The vibrant Old Norse poems in this collection, which may have been brought together as early as the thirteenth century, authentically capture the ancient oral traditions of the Norsemen. In addition, their images of a mythical world profoundly influenced latter-day storytellers as Richard Wagner...

More than a century after its composition, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus--Wittgenstein's first masterwork, and the only book he published during his lifetime--endures as the definitive modern text on what logic can and cannot do. Since its first English-language publication in 1922, this profoundly enigmatic work has...

Nobel laureate Halldór Laxness's Under the Glacier is a one-of-a-kind masterpiece, a wryly provocative novel at once earthy and otherworldly. At its outset, the Bishop of Iceland dispatches a young emissary to investigate certain charges against the pastor at Sn fells Glacier, who, among...