Series: The Seagull Library of German Literature

Germany, 1977. Close to death, an old man collapses and struggles to his bed. The sounds of the endless night unsettle him, triggering images, questions and memories. In What Darkness Was, Inka Parei allows the reader to inhabit a singular German mind. Precise and observant—but uncomprehending and on the brink of hysteria—the old man wracks his brain as the questions...

This is a biographical novel that tells the story of Chaim Soutine, a Jewish painter from Belorussia who had to be smuggled back to Paris in 1943. August 6, 1943. Chaim Soutine, a Jewish painter from Belorussia and a contemporary of Chagall, Modigliani, and Picasso, is hidden in a hearse that’s travelling from a small town on the Loire towards...

Continuing where Reimann's earlier book of diaries, I Have No Regrets, left off in 1964, this volume is a compelling and frank account of one woman’s life and loves in 1960s East Germany. It All Tastes of Farewell is a frank account of one woman’s life and loves in 1960s East Germany. As a writer, Brigitte Reimann could not help...

Shortlisted for the 2019 Schlegel-Tieck Prize The poems of Ulrike Almut Sandig are at once simple and fantastic. This new collection finds her on her way to imaginary territories. Thick of It charts a journey through two hemispheres to 'the center of the world' and navigates a 'thicket' that is at once the world, the psyche, and language itself. The...

When Kurt Weber inherits his great-uncle's lakeside house, he finds traces of the dark secrets of his family's past. The early inhabitants of the house haunt his dreams nightly. One day, a ghostlike woman appears before him, hiding herself in a room that had been kept locked throughout his childhood. Inside, Kurt finds a hidden stash of photographs, letters, and...

It's the early 1970s and Dion Katthusen, thirteen, is growing up fatherless in a small village in northern Germany. An only child plagued with a devastating stutter, Dion is ostracised by his peers and finds solace in the company of nature, collecting dragonflies in a moor filled with myths and legends. On the precipice of adulthood, Dion begins to spill...

Any new book by poet, essayist, writer, and translator Hans Magnus Enzensberger, one of the most influential and internationally renowned German intellectuals, is cause for notice, and Mr Zed's Reflections is no exception. Every afternoon for almost a year, a plump man named Mr Zed comes to the same spot in the city park and engages passers-by with quick-witted repartee....

Klaus Merz is one of the most prominent, prolific, and versatile Swiss writers working today. Celebrated as a master of concise, condensed sentences, Merz brings depth and resonance to spare narratives with lyrical prose and striking images. Stigmata of Bliss brings together three of Merz's critically acclaimed novellas, offering English readers the perfect introduction to his work. Jacob Asleep introduces...

Inka Parei's novel The Cold Centre begins with a man who receives a startling call from his ex-wife. She's in the hospital, awaiting a cancer diagnosis. His mind races as he suddenly realises he must find out whether she was contaminated by fallout from the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster. Quickly returning to the city, he tries to reconstruct the events...

Growing up in Saddam Hussein's Iraq, a young Kurdish boy named Kerim has ample opportunity to witness the murderous repression that defined the era for thousands of Iraqis. The Dark Ship tells the story of the kind of trauma and striving that leads a man from religious extremism to a vain hope for redemption. We follow Kerim from the fading...

'My father bought me from the council for 365 francs,' recalls the narrator in Monica Cantieni's novel The Encyclopaedia of Good Reasons. She's a young girl, an immigrant to Switzerland whose adoption is yet to be finalised. When she finally moves into her new home with her new family, she recounts her days in the orphanage and how starkly different...

Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2019 On the day of the Great Fall he left nothing, nothing at all behind. The latest work by Peter Handke, one of our greatest living writers, chronicles a day in the life of an ageing actor as he makes his way on foot from the outskirts of a great metropolis into its...

During a 1960 interview, East German writer Christa Wolf was asked a curious question: Would she describe in detail what she did on September 27th? Fascinated by considering the significance of a single day over many years, Wolf began keeping a detailed diary of September 27th, a practice which she carried on for more than fifty years until her death...

Jurek Becker (1937-1997) is best known for his novel Jacob the Liar, which follows the life of a man who, like Becker, lived in the Łódź ghetto during the German occupation of Poland in World War II. Throughout his career, Becker also wrote nonfiction, and the essays, lectures, and interviews collected in My Father, the Germans and I share a...

Our twice-yearly daylight savings holiday, in which we faithfully, collectively adjust our clocks, is purely human tampering with the calendar. Yet, it is a practice that is embedded in nature's principles, even as we exact more sunlight for ourselves in an over-organised, technological world. Mirroring this dichotomy, Michael Krüger brings us Seasonal Time Change, a collection of poems where an...

Singers Die Twice is the story of a life in music. One of Germany's best-known exponents of North Indian classical music, specifically dhrupad singing, Peter Pannke has travelled from his home in Germany to Varanasi, Delhi, Darbhanga, and the forests of Vrindaban to study classical Indian singing in the most famous gharanas—musical houses—of India. His richly woven story takes readers...

For distinguished philosopher Hans Blumenberg, lions were a life-long obsession. Lions, translated by Kri Driscoll, collects thirty-two of Blumenberg's philosophical vignettes to reveal that the figure of the lion unites two of his other great preoccupations: metaphors and anecdotes as non-philosophical forms of knowledge. Each of these short texts, sparkling with erudition and humour, is devoted to a peculiar leonine...

Zurich Transit, a screenplay by Swiss playwright and novelist Max Frisch, was developed from an episode in his 1964 novel Gantenbein, or A Wilderness of Mirrors. At the centre of both works is Theo Ehrismann, a man who cannot seem to change his life no matter how many times he resolves to do so. Chance comes to Theo one day...

Kuno, a male nurse in a Swiss retirement home, has a new inmate: his father. In the confines of their new home, the pair does something surprising – they finally begin to talk. Kuno had always regarded his father as a boring man without a history or a destiny, until they are thrust together and he learns that his father...

Of course I had to end up here... Over ten rainy nights, Thomas, an ex-bargeman who used to be skipper of his own boat, walks the muddy fields of the landlocked German interior and remembers the events that lost him his home, his boat, and his livelihood: his apprenticeship in the cold halls of the Royal Naval College in London;...

Rainer Brambach, one of the most widely appreciated Swiss poets in the 1950s and '60s, was notorious for walking to the beat of his own drum, denying convention and standing his ground against popular styles and trends. He grew up in Basel and left school at the age of fourteen to become a manual labourer. He spent much of World...

In the historic tradition of calendar stories and calendar illustrations, author and film director Alexander Kluge and celebrated visual artist Gerhard Richter have composed December, a collection of thirty-nine stories and thirty-nine snow-swept photographs for the darkest month of the year. In stories drawn from modern history and the contemporary moment, from mythology, and even from meteorology, Kluge toys as...

Ingeborg Bachmann (1926–1973) is recognised as one of post-war German literature's most important novelists, poets, and playwrights. Influenced by Hans Weigel and the legendary literary circle Gruppe 47, Bachmann gained international renown for her poems, short stories, and novels, and won numerous awards for her work. Nearly twenty years after her death, during an estate sale in Vienna, fifteen episodes...