{"title":"The Seagull Library Of German Literature","description":"\u003cp\u003eDelve into the rich tapestry of German literature with the Seagull Library. Discover compelling stories, profound insights, and timeless classics from one of Europe's most influential literary traditions. Start your exploration now.\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"all-the-roads-are-open-book-annemarie-schwarzenbach-9780857428226","title":"All the Roads Are Open","description":"In June 1939 Annemarie Schwarzenbach and fellow writer Ella Maillart  set out from Geneva in a Ford, heading for Afghanistan. The first women  to travel Afghanistan’s Northern Road, they fled the storm brewing in  Europe to seek a place untouched by what they considered to be Western  neuroses. The Afghan journey documented in All the Roads Are Open is  one of the most important episodes of Schwarzenbach’s turbulent life.  Her incisive, lyrical essays offer a unique glimpse of an Afghanistan  already touched by the “fateful laws known as progress,” a remote yet  “sensitive nerve centre of world politics” caught amid great powers in  upheaval. In her writings, Schwarzenbach conjures up the desolate beauty  of landscapes both internal and external, reflecting on the longings  and loneliness of travel as well as its grace. Maillart’s account of their trip, The Cruel Way, stands as a  classic of travel literature, and, now available for the first time in  English, Schwarzenbach’s memoir rounds out the story of the adventure. Praise for the German Edition “Above all, [Schwarzenbach’s] discovery of the Orient was a  personal one. But the author never loses sight of the historical and  social context. . . . She shows no trace of colonialist arrogance. In  fact, the pieces also reflect the experience of crisis, the loss of  confidence which, in that decade, seized the long-arrogant culture of  the West.”—Süddeutsche Zeitung","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49736863416593,"sku":"NGR9780857428226","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49758986305809,"sku":"CIN0857428225G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51552449364241,"sku":"CIN0857428225VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0857428225.jpg?v=1750883814"},{"product_id":"what-darkness-was-book-inka-parei-9780857428325","title":"What Darkness Was","description":"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, author of The Shadow-Boxing Woman, 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 flow like water: why did he inherit the building he now lives in? Why did he leave the city that was his home for so long? Is he even here voluntarily? And who was that suspicious stranger on the stairs? Lying in bed, the old man is aware that these questions may be the last puzzles he ever solves. Combining tight prose with a compulsive delight in detail, Parei’s second novel in English presents a dynamic portrait of the West German soul from World War II through the German Autumn of 1977.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49736884289809,"sku":"NGR9780857428325","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0857428322.jpg?v=1750704169"},{"product_id":"death-in-persia-book-annemarie-schwarzenbach-9780857428233","title":"Death in Persia","description":"Since the rediscovery of her work in the late 1980s, Annemarie  Schwarzenbach—journalist, traveler, archaeologist, opium addict, and  antifascist novelist—has become a European cult figure among free spirited bohemians. Available in English for the first time and beautifully translated by Lucy Renner Jones, Death in Persia  is a collage of the political and the private, documenting  Schwarzenbach’s intimate feelings and public ideas during four trips to  Persia between 1933 and 1939. From her reflections on individual  responsibility in the lead-up to World War II to her reactions to  accusations from her friends of having deserted Europe and the  antifascist cause for Tehran, Schwarzenbach recorded a great deal about  daily life in Persia, and, most personally, her ill-fated love affair  with Jalé, the daughter of the Turkish ambassador. Chronologically preceding Schwarzenbach’s exquisite travelogue All the Roads are Open, an account of her automobile journey from Geneva to Afghanistan in 1939, Death in Persia  is the enthralling diary of an astute observer standing at the  crossroads of major events in history and a gorgeous new addition to  Annemarie Schwarzenbach’s growing English-language oeuvre.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49737010250001,"sku":"NGR9780857428233","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0857428233.jpg?v=1751044329"},{"product_id":"cold-centre-book-inka-parei-9780857428318","title":"The Cold Centre","description":"Inka Parei’s novel The Cold Centre begins with a man who receives a startling call from his ex-wife. 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He soon begins to lose control over his days in Berlin, entering into a desperate search for orientation over a fracture in his own life—one he has never gotten over.      Written in Parei’s characteristically precise prose, The Cold Centre is a timely reminder of how we react to accidents—nuclear and otherwise— and a bleakly realistic description of East Berlin before the Wall fell. Its tight and dizzying structure keeps readers on the edge of their seats as the narrator tries to solve his mystery.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49737543876881,"sku":"NGR9780857428318","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50370587918609,"sku":"CIN0857428314VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0857428314.jpg?v=1750915611"},{"product_id":"mr-zed-s-reflections-book-hans-magnus-enzensberger-9780857428219","title":"Mr Zed's Reflections","description":"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 passersby with quick-witted repartee. Those who pass ask, who is this man? A wisecracker, a clown, a belligerent philosopher? Many shake their heads and move on; others listen to him, engage with him, and, again and again, end up at the same place. He doesn’t write anything down, but his listeners often take notes. With subversive energy and masterful brevity, Mr. Zed undermines arrogance, megalomania, and false authority. A determined speaker who doesn’t care for ambitions, he forces topics that others would rather keep to themselves. Reluctant to trust institutions and seeing absolutely nothing as “non-negotiable,” he admits mistakes and does away with judgment.  He is no mere ventriloquist dummy for his creator—he is too stubborn for that. And at the end of the season, when it becomes too cold and uncomfortable in the park, he disappears, never to be seen again.   Collected in this thought-provoking and unique work are the considerations and provocations of this squat, park-bench philosopher, giving us a volume of truths and conversations that are clear-cut, skeptical, and fiercely illuminating.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49737555280145,"sku":"NGR9780857428219","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0857428217.jpg?v=1751443469"},{"product_id":"ludwig-s-room-book-alois-hotschnig-9780857428301","title":"Ludwig's Room","description":"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. And 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 documents. 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He shows up just on time for his own funeral and observes the attending mourners, and yet he is not able to reveal himself to them, and especially not to his wife. “How does one say that he is alive,” wonders Theo.  Life, as Frisch said, “is the sum of events that happen by chance, and it always could as well have turned out differently; there is not a single action or omission that does not allow for variables in the future.” Zurich Transit presents Frisch at the height of his dramatic powers and exemplifies his ardent believe in a dramaturgy of coincidence rather than causality.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49737578709265,"sku":"NGR9780857428189","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0857428187.jpg?v=1750786870"},{"product_id":"encyclopaedia-of-good-reasons-book-monica-cantieni-9780857428363","title":"The Encyclopaedia of Good Reasons","description":"“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 finalized. When she finally moves into her new home with her new family, she recounts her days in the orphanage and how starkly different her life is now. Her new community speaks German, a language foreign to her, and she collects words and phrases in matchboxes. Though her relationship with her adoptive parents is strained, she bonds with her adoptive grandfather Tat, and together they create the eponymous “Encyclopaedia of Good Reasons.”   Set in the time of the crucial 1970 Swiss referendum on immigration, Monica Cantieni introduces us to a host of colorful characters who struggle to make Switzerland their home: Eli, the Spanish bricklayer; Toni, the Italian factory worker with movie star looks; Madame Jelisaweta, the Yugoslav hairdresser; and Milena, the mysterious girl in the wardrobe. 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Each of these short texts, sparkling with erudition and humor, is devoted to a peculiar leonine presence—or, in many cases, absence—in literature, art, philosophy, religion, and politics. From Ecclesiastes to the New Testament Apocrypha, Dürer to Henri Rousseau, Aesop and La Fontaine to Rilke and Thomas Mann, the extraordinary breadth of Blumenberg’s knowledge and intellectual curiosity is on full display. Lions has much to offer readers, both those already familiar with Blumenberg’s oeuvre and newcomers looking for an introduction to the thought of one of Germany’s most important postwar philosophers.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49737605218577,"sku":"NGR9780857428264","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49810071191825,"sku":"CIN0857428268G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0857428268.jpg?v=1751396874"},{"product_id":"dark-company-book-gert-loschtz-9780857428288","title":"Dark Company","description":"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; the dangers of the mean streets and waterfront of New York in the 1970s, and Poland under martial law; Germany after the reunification, when for a year or so it seemed that the whole country drifted rudderless, drawn by the current of history to who knows where. Thomas remembers childhood, his first love, and the warnings of his grandfather: Beware the dark company! This mysterious band of men and women dressed in black cast a shadow over his story, as he wrestles with the secrets, the unplumbed depths of his soul, the hazards lurking below a seemingly placid surface, and throughout it all, the rain, falling night after night. Dark Company is a superb example of a distinctly German tradition in weird fiction which claims its roots in Kafka and Herbert Rosendorfer.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49737757819153,"sku":"NGR9780857428288","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0857428284.jpg?v=1751396874"},{"product_id":"dark-ship-book-sherko-fatah-9780857428394","title":"The Dark Ship","description":"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. In Sherko Fatah’s The Dark Ship, we experience an extraordinary new voice in fiction, which 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 memories of his childhood to his life running his family’s roadside restaurant. Captured by jihadists, he reluctantly joins the group, and grows fascinated with their charismatic leader. After a narrow escape from martyrdom and a difficult passage to Europe, Kerim, tormented by memories of his violent past, is unable to find his place in his new country. Turning yet again to his faith, he finds solace in the fundamentalist mosques of his new city. But it isn’t long before he learns once again that he cannot escape his history, his culture, or his own doubts.   At once a thriller and a political narrative, The Dark Ship tracks the Kurdish experience from the war-torn mountains of northern Iraq to the bureaucracies and mosques of Berlin in a gripping journey across land and water, through ideology and faith.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49738482876689,"sku":"NGR9780857428394","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/085742839X.jpg?v=1750883816"},{"product_id":"great-fall-book-peter-handke-9780857428417","title":"The Great Fall","description":"“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 life of an aging actor as he makes his way on foot from the outskirts of a great metropolis into its center. He is scheduled to receive a prestigious award that evening from the country’s president, and the following day he is supposed to start shooting for a film—perhaps his last—in which he plays a man who runs amok. While passing through a forest, he encounters the outcasts of the society—homeless people and migrants—but he keeps trudging along, traversing a suburb whose inhabitants are locked in petty but mortal conflicts, crossing a seemingly unbridgeable superhighway, and wandering into an abandoned railyard, where police, unused to pedestrians, detain him briefly on suspicion of terrorism.     Things don’t improve when he reaches the heart of the city. There he can’t help but see the alienation characteristic of its residents and the omnipresent malign influence of electronic technology. What, then, is the “Great Fall”? What is this heart-wrenching, humorous, distinctively attentive narrative trying to tell us? As usual, Peter Handke, deeply introspective and powerfully critical of the world around him, leaves it to the reader to figure out.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49738495721745,"sku":"NGR9780857428417","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53404635693329,"sku":"GOR013299884","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0857428411.jpg?v=1750786870"},{"product_id":"moor-book-gunther-geltinger-9780857428332","title":"Moor","description":"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 ostracized 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 the secrets of his heart—his burning desire for faultless speech and his abiding relationship with his mother, a failed painter with secrets of her own. Even as Dion spins his story, his speech is filled with fissures and holes—much like the swampy earth that surrounds him. Nature, though so often sublime, can also be terribly cruel.  Moor is Dion’s story—a story of escaping the quicksand of loneliness and of the demands we make on love, even as those surrounding us are hurt in their misguided attempts to bear our suffering. Powerfully tuned to the relationship between human and nature, mother and son, Moor is a mysterious and experimental portrait of childhood. Written by up-and-coming German novelist Gunther Geltinger, the novel received critical acclaim in Germany and is now presented in English for the first time by translator Alexander Booth. Evocative and bold, Dion’s story emerges from the forces of nature, his voice rising from the ground beneath the reader’s feet, not soon to be forgotten.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49738570793233,"sku":"NGR9780857428332","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0857428330.jpg?v=1750980964"},{"product_id":"in-the-congo-book-urs-widmer-9780857428257","title":"In the Congo","description":"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 risked his life in the war. Stunned, Kuno embarks on a journey into his own psyche, taking him to the depths of the Congo. Here, longings awaken and dreams come true—rays of light in the darkness, meetings with kings, seductive women, and the songs of the jungle. This alluring far-away place he once regarded as the heart of darkness suddenly becomes an exciting locale of lunacy, wildness, and tests of inner strength.   In Urs Widmer’s characteristic style, In the Congo is a riveting yarn, threading through not only the relationship between a father and son, but that of Africa and Europe. Translated by Donal McLaughlin, this novel will delight Widmer fans the world over and will turn our notions of colonialism on their heads.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49738582884625,"sku":"NGR9780857428257","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/085742825X.jpg?v=1750947259"},{"product_id":"december-book-alexander-kluge-9780857428202","title":"December","description":"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 readily  with time and space as he does with his characters. In the narrative  entry for December 1931, Adolf Hitler avoids a car crash by inches. In  another, we relive Greek financial crises. There are stories where time  accelerates, and others in which it seems to slow to the pace of falling  snow. In Kluge’s work, power seems only to erode and decay, never grow,  and circumstances always seem to elude human control. When a German  commander outside Moscow in December of 1941 remarks, “We don’t need  weapons to fight the Russians but a weapon to fight the weather,” the  futility of his struggle is painfully present.  Accompanied by the ghostly and wintry forest scenes captured in  Gerhard Richter's photographs, these stories have an alarming density,  one that gives way at unexpected moments to open vistas and narrative  clarity. Within these pages, the lessons are perhaps not as comforting  as in the old calendar stories, but the subversive moralities are always  instructive and perfectly executed. Praise for Alexander Kluge“More than a few of Kluge's many books are essential, brilliant achievements. None are without great interest.”—Susan Sontag “Alexander Kluge, that most enlightened of writers.”—W.G. Sebald","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49738604937489,"sku":"NGR9780857428202","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0857428209.jpg?v=1751330386"},{"product_id":"soutines-last-journey-book-ralph-dutli-9781803092164","title":"Soutines Last Journey","description":"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 traveling from a small town on the Loire towards Nazi-occupied Paris. Suffering from a stomach ulcer, he urgently needs a life-saving operation. But the hearse must avoid the occupiers’ checkpoints, and it becomes increasingly likely that he will not survive the journey.     In a stream of extraordinary images, the morphine-induced artist hallucinates and remembers his life. He dreams of his childhood in Smilovichi near Minsk; his beginnings as a painter in Vilna; his arrival in 1913 in the art capital of the world, Paris, where he befriends Modigliani; and his survival of years of struggle and finding sudden success, only to be persecuted and forced into hiding when the Nazis invade. Back in the present, the painter believes that the power of milk is the only possible remedy for his ulcer. In his mind, he is traveling to a “white paradise”—a strange clinic where a “god in white” declares him healed but forbids him to paint. But for Soutine, neither paradise nor salvation exists if he cannot paint. So, he begins to paint again in secret, willing to pay the price of discovery.     A brilliant biographical novel about childhood, longing, friendship, bodily pain, and the wounds of exile, Ralph Dutli’s Soutine’s Last Journey is ultimately an exploration of language and the power of art.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49749501214993,"sku":"NGR9781803092164","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53068863013137,"sku":"GOR014725686","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1803092165.jpg?v=1751185030"},{"product_id":"it-all-tastes-of-farewell-book-brigitte-reimann-9781803092270","title":"It All Tastes of Farewell","description":"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 but tell a compelling story, and that is born out here in her diaries, which are gripping as any novel. She recorded only what mattered: telling details, emotional truths, and political realities. Never written for publication and first published in full in German only after the fall of the Berlin Wall, these diaries offer a unique record of what it felt like to live in a country that no longer exists, was represented for years largely through Cold War propaganda, and is still portrayed in fairy-tale Stasi dramas. Here we get a sense of lived experience as if Doris Lessing or Edna O’Brien had been allowed in with their notebooks. This volume continues where her earlier book of diaries, I Have No Regrets, left off, in 1964. It sees Reimann grow wistful and at times bitter, as her love life, her professional life, and her health all suffer. Yet throughout she retains a lively appetite for new experiences and a dedication to writing. Finally, she finds security in a surprising new love, and although she died soon after this volume ends, the novel she was writing was to become a much-read cult hit after her death.     A remarkable document from a time and place that we still struggle to see clearly, It All Tastes of Farewell is unforgettable, a last gift from an essential writer.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49749511733521,"sku":"NGR9781803092270","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1803092270.jpg?v=1751436812"},{"product_id":"30-april-1945-book-alexander-kluge-9781803092294","title":"30 April 1945","description":"A reissue of Alexander Kluge's kaleidoscopic view of a historically important day and its effects on many people’s lives.   April 30, 1945, marked an end of sorts in the Third Reich. The last business day before a national holiday and then a series of transfers of power, April 30 was a day filled with contradictions and bewildering events that would forever define global history. It was on this day that while the Red Army occupied Berlin, Hitler committed suicide in his underground bunker, and, in San Francisco, the United Nations was being founded.   Alexander Kluge’s latest book, 30 April 1945, covers this single historic day and unravels its passing hours across the different theaters of the Second World War. Translated by Wieland Hoban, the book delves into the events happening around the world on one fateful day, including the life of a small German town occupied by American forces and the story of two SS officers stranded on the forsaken Kerguelen Islands in the South Indian Sea. Kluge is a master storyteller, and as he unfolds these disparate tales, one unavoidable question surfaces: What is the appropriate reaction to the total upheaval of the status quo?   Presented here with an afterword by Reinhard Jirgl, translated by Iain Galbraith, 30 April 1945 is a riveting collection of lives turned upside down by the deadliest war in history. The collective experiences Kluge paints here are jarring, poignant, and imbued with meaning. Seventy years later, we can still see our own reflections on the upheaval of a single day in 1945.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49749530181905,"sku":"NGR9781803092294","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51052397691153,"sku":"NIN9781803092294","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1803092297.jpg?v=1751122543"},{"product_id":"one-day-a-year-book-christa-wolf-9780857424273","title":"One Day a Year","description":"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 in 2011. 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A mid-sized cathedral town of no particular industrial or strategic importance, Halberstadt was almost totally destroyed, and a then-thirteen-year-old Alexander Kluge watched his town burn to the ground.   Incorporating photographs, diagrams, and drawings, Kluge captures the overwhelming rapidity and totality of the organized destruction of his town from numerous perspectives, bringing to life both the strategy from above and the futility of the response on the ground. Originally published in German in 1977, this exquisite report, fragmentary and unfinished, is one of Kluge’s most personal works and one of the best examples of his literary technique. The English edition of Air Rair includes additional new stories by the author and features an appreciation of the work by W. G. Sebald. “More than a few of Kluge’s many books are essential, brilliant achievements. 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