White Cross Mills, Hightown, LANCASTER LA1 4XS, United Kingdom.
Telephone: +44(0)1524 68765
Fax: +44(0)1524 63232
Email: sales@gazellebooks.co.uk
Web: www.gazellebooks.co.uk
| AGAINST THE GRAIN : New Anthology of Contemporary Austrian Prose [Adolf Opel] This sequel to Relationships contains texts by newer authors: Aigner, August, Baier, Brem, Brunmaier, Eibel, Ferk, Gruber, Gstrein, Hackl, Hermann, Herzele, Hlawaty, Hochgatterer, Kaiser, Kerschbaumer, Klepalski, Klier, Langle, Menasse, Merkl, Mitterer, Neuwirth, Ohrt, Reichart, Schantl, Schindel, Schlag, Schoener, Schutting, Siegmund, Skwara, Steiner, Szyszkowitz, Treudl, Wager, Wenger. One section contains statements by the authors about themselves. { 314pp, 140x215mm, January 1997; PB, £16.99, 1572410310:9781572410312 , Ariadne Press } |
| ALEXANDER LERNET-HOLENIA : Resignation und Rebellion (Bin ich denn wirklich, was ihr einst wart?) [Thomas Hübel, Manfred Müller & Gerald Sommer] Text in German. Papers of a conference held in Vienna on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Alexander Lernet-Holenia's birth. Essays by: Marianne Gruber, Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler, Claudia Tuppy, Kai Luehrs-Kaiser, Martin Esslin, Donald G. Daviau, Krysztof Lipi ski, Hélène Barrière, Rüdiger Görner, Adolf Haslinger, Thomas Hübel, Gerald Sommer, Walter H. Sokel, Jean-Jacques Pollet, Manfred Müller. { 254pp, 140x215mm, December 2005; PB, £18.99, 1572411430:9781572411432 , Ariadne Press } |
| ANTHOLOGY OF PLAYS BY WERNER SCHWAB [Translated by Michael Mitchell] Schwab's first play was performed in 1990; in 1992 German critics elected him playwright of the year; he died in 1994, leaving behind a total of some fifteen plays. Many of his plays created a furore when produced, but their stage effectiveness made them very successful with theatre audiences. His disrupted language constantly breaks the rules of syntax and ignores the conventions of expression. Yet it still works. Indeed, it is a very effective instrument for revealing the violence which lies not so far below the surface of "respectable" society, which is Schwab's major theme. { 194pp, 140x215mm, January 1999; PB, £12.50, 1572410647:9781572410640 , Ariadne Press } |
| APHORISMS [Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach] This book contains the entire collection of 582 aphorisms which the nineteenth-century Austrian writer Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach (1830-1916) published in a number of expanded editions beginning in 1880. While this author also wrote poems, plays, novels, and novellas, she is known today particularly for her insightful aphorisms. Stating that "An aphorism is the last link in a long chain of thought," she presents intellectually stimulating and socially engaged commentaries dealing with various aspects of human nature. Because of their universality, these thoughts by one of the best aphoristic writers in the German language have lost none of their relevance today. { 85pp, 140x215mm, January 1994; PB, £7.50, 0929497864:9780929497860 , Ariande Press } |
| ARTHUR SCHNITZLER [Sol Liptzin] This book treats the renowned Austrian author and artist -- as thinker, by tracing the basic ideas in his novels and dramas; as artist, by tracing the genesis of characteristic works until the final satisfying version, a process that could take up to twenty years to complete. Schnitzler was above all a perfectionist. Schnitzler's creative work is largely an expression of his yearning for life and his preoccupation with death. At his best he is not a cheerful poet. Death ever lurks behind the merry words and the light-hearted love affairs of his characters. Repeatedly this "diagnostician of his time" reminds us that all acts and relations, all eternal vows and far-flung ambitions are but transitory. It is this consciousness of death's omnipresence which often lends to Schnitzler's works the unique melancholy and particular pathos associated with his name. Schnitzler is regarded today not only as the outstanding author of his generation in Austria, but also as a writer who belongs to world literature. { 196pp, 140x215mm, December 1995; PB, £13.50, 1572410132:9781572410138 , Ariande Press } |
| ARTHUR SCHNITZLER & POLITICS [Adrian Clive Roberts] Roberts takes issue with the still-prevalent though erroneous notion that Schnitzler was an apolitical writer. From 1880 to 1931 Schnitzler examined human conflict from the duel to war, and commented on social and political circumstances. Roberts draws upon previously unpublished documents to support his interpretation of Schnitzler's oeuvre from a socio-political perspective. { 214pp, 140x215mm, December 1989; PB, £15.50, 0929497147:9780929497143 , Ariande Press } |
| ASHANTEE [Peter Altenberg] This collection of thirty-eight impressionist episodes describes a white man's friendship with a group of Ashanti tribespeople from the Gold Coast of Africa (the former British colony known today as Ghana), who in 1896 were put on display as living objects in a popular ethnographic exhibit in the Vienna Zoological Garden, then still located in Vienna's famous amusement park called Prater. The exhibit caused a veritable "Ashanti fever" as the show attracted five to six thousand visitors per day. Altenberg, barely disguised as Ashantee's autobiographical character Sir Peter, shows a genuine curiosity about the cultural Other and paints a critical picture of his Austrian contemporaries’ prejudices, revealed as they were experienced by the Africans. In "Ashantee", beautiful, sensual, childlike, and wholesome African "paradise people" provide inspiration for the tormented civilised soul of the fin-de-siècle European. Eccentric coffeehouse writer Altenberg is famous for his unique telegram style. Critic Karl Kraus claimed, "One sentence by Peter Altenberg is equal to an entire Viennese novel". "Ashantee" introduces the reader to a little-known facet of vibrant Vienna around 1900. Combining cross-cultural sympathy with colonial stereotyping, the book has gained new popularity as current debates about the challenges of cultural coexistence in the global society have renewed interest in the literature about encounters between people of different ethnic and cultural backgrounds. In this edition, Peter Altenberg's literary text is illustrated with reprints of original drawings and photographs of Altenberg and the Ashanti in Vienna. { 128pp, 155x230mm, December 2007; PB, £9.99, 1572411554:9781572411555 , Ariadne Press } |
| AUSTRIA AS IT IS, OR SKETCHES OF CONTINENTAL COURTS [Charles Sealsfield] In London in 1827 Charles Sealsfield (Karl Postl) published this travel novel employing eye-witness accounts, history, and anecdote to expose the oppressive Austrian regime under Emperor Francis I and his Prime Minister Metternich. His political observations are supplemented and embellished by his many detailed descriptions of the fads and fancies of the age, anecdotes and court gossip surrounding major historical figures, as well as by his dry wit which all combine to produce an eminently readable and informative book. During his lifetime Charles Sealsfield was a mystery, an unknown in so far as his identity was concerned. As a young Austrian émigré, his first publications were colorful descriptions of the fledgling United States on the one hand and of the moribund Austrian Empire on the other. Within a few years he became widely celebrated as the author of popular fiction about the American West, considered by many to be superior to American-born authors such as James Fenimore Cooper and Washington Irving. { 136pp, 140x215mm, July 2004; PB, £11.99, 1572411112:9781572411111 , Ariadne Press } |
| AUSTRIA IN LITERATURE [Donald G Daviau] National Image, which to a country is what character is for a person, ranks as an extremely important concern for every nation and for the people living in it. Nowhere is this more true than in Austria which depends heavily on tourism and which welcomes foreign investment. Indeed, image for Austria becomes doubly important, for throughout its history the country has always stood in the shadow of Germany in the view of the outside world, where even the greatest Austrian accomplishments in all of the arts have generally been subsumed under the rubric of German literature, art, and music. In this context the aim of the essays contained here is to establish what the image of Austria has been historically and what it is today. The contributions examine the view of Austria projected in the writings of American, Austrian and German authors, ranging from the late nineteenth century to the present. While recognising the many appealing qualities -- the natural beauty and the former grandeur of the Monarchy -- the writers at home and abroad have at the same time candidly and unsparingly criticised political and social problems. All together the analyses result in a multifaceted portrayal of the changing perception of Austria both externally and internally. { 326pp, 140x215mm, March 2000; PB, £20.50, 1572410655:9781572410657 , Ariande Press } |
| AUSTRIA IN THE THIRTIES : Culture & Politics [Kenneth Segar & John Warren (eds)] These essays deal with the interaction between culture and politics during the period of the Austrian Corporate State, the five years preceding the Anschluss in 1938. The contributions show that no aspect of literary and cultural life remained unchanged by the National Socialist infiltration that took place in the 1930s. All Austrian writers, publishers, theatre directors, and film makers had to decide whether to face economic penalty by opposing National Socialism and being blacklisted in Germany or to seek financial advantage by joining the Nazi movement. Jewish writers and political activists had no choice but were forced to flee into exile or face imprisonment in concentration camps after the Anschluss. { 391pp, 140x215mm, December 1991; PB, £22.99, 0929497295:9780929497297 , Ariande Press } |
| AUSTRIAN IDENTITIES : Twentieth-Century Short Fiction [Craig Decker (ed)] In the course of the twentieth century, Austria has been transformed from the centre of a multi-ethnic and multi-lingual empire of fifty-three million people to a republic of approximately eight million predominantly German-speaking citizens. The demise of the Habsburg Empire, the traumas of two world wars, the barbarism of fascism, and the political stability and economic prosperity of the Second Austrian Republic have all played a significant role in shaping modern Austrian identities. The short stories included in this volume, written by such authors as Ingeborg Bachmann, Thomas Bernhard, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Robert Musil, Joseph Roth, and Arthur Schnitzler, present a vivid array of Austrian characters whose lives have been shaped by both major historical events and the concerns and contingencies of everyday existence. { 236pp, 140x215mm, October 2004; PB, £17.99, 1572411295:9781572411296 , Ariadne Press } |
| AUSTRIAN NATION : Cultural Consciousness & Socio-Political Processes [Ernst Bruckmuller] Initially published in 1984, this is a revised translation into English and provides an informative Afterword by Lowell A Bangerter (Professor of German, University of Wyoming) of a seminal and scholarly work that combines historical analysis, social research, and a broad survey of the unique culture forces and politics that have shaped present-day Austria. Individual chapters address controversies, myths, stereotypes, the wide variety of ethnic groups, and more. The Austrian Nation is thoughtfully recommended as being a seminal and ground breaking study of a European nation. { 484pp, 155x230mm, January 2003; PB, £30.99, 1572411155:9781572411159 , Ariadne Press } |
| BENGAL TIGER [Jeannie Ebner; Translated by Lowell A Bangerter] An impetuous street urchin with the slanted, yellowish eyes of a predator, a hardened peasant grandmother whose spirit remains unbroken by urban misery, a beautiful, insane Amazon with a horribly fascinating serpentine scar, an unemployed father turned sex-murderer, an animal trainer who loses control of his beasts at a critical moment, a doctor in charge of a ward in a mental institution, and the tiger -- these are central figures in a story that explores a variety of problems characteristic of modern existence: alienation, moral degeneration, mental and spiritual decay, the collapse of the family, the timeless conflicts between male and female, parent and child, nature and civilisation. “The Bengal Tiger” describes a small boy's search for love, acceptance, and security in a hostile environment. { 101pp, 140x215mm, January 1992; PB, £8.50, 0929497546:9780929497549 , Ariadne Press } |
| BEST OF AUSTRIAN SCIENCE FICTION [Franz Rottensteiner] Unlike fantasy, science fiction has no deep tradition or broad basis in Austrian literature. It is mostly written by authors who have written no other fiction, sometimes by professional scientists for whom science fiction is their natural literary outlet. Herbert W. Franke, Peter Schattschneider or Michael Springer are all physicists. Most prolific and prominent among them is H.W. Franke, but even he cannot make a living from science fiction; like Austrian literature in general, Austrian science fiction is published mostly by German houses. This anthology presents a representative sample of Austrian science fiction and contains a comprehensive overview of the history and current state of science fiction in Austria by the editor. { 318pp, 140x215mm, January 2001; PB, £21.50, 1572410787:9781572410787 , Ariadne Press } |
| BORN-WHERE [Robert Schindel] The protagonist is a concentration-camp survivor who is summoned back to Vienna to testify at a belated war-crimes trial. In the course of his reluctant return, he meets the past and the present in Austria making readers aware of how things were and how much of history and of the legacy of racism still lingers on today. This confrontation/Assimilation makes for, among other things, an intergenerational psychological ghost story. The book touches on every aspect of the unresolved and perhaps unresolvable relations between contemporary Germans/Austrians and Jews. One sub-theme concerns the Left’s resistance to Nazism. Another takes us inside the workings of contemporary Austrian bureaucracy. There are also invariably impossible romantic relationships between Jews and Germans. { 298pp, 140x215mm, January 1995; PB, £15.50, 1572410019:9781572410015 , Ariadne Press } |
| BRAZIL : A Land of the Future [Stefan Zweig] The Austrian poet, playwright, novelist, biographer, and essayist, Stefan Zweig (1881-1942), committed suicide partly in despair over the rise of the Third Reich; but in the late 1930s, Zweig traveled to Brazil and wrote about its cities, history, economy, and culture. { 259pp, 140x215mm, January 2000; PB, £14.99, 1572410833:9781572410831 , Ariadne Press } |
| BROKEN SONGS : An Adolescent In War-Torn Vienna [Garziella Hlawaty] Like all good historical novels, 'Broken Songs' reveals what it was like for ordinary people to live through the great events of the history books. Through the eyes of the mostly apolitical fifteen-year-old protagonist we experience the songs and flags, the radio propaganda of the last year of World War 2; frequent air raids, taking shelter in the catacombs, emerging each time to assess the damage and see people digging bodies out of the rubble, often with their bare hands become the routine. In spite of her harsh and punitive mother, who thrusts too much responsibility for her younger half-brothers on her, there are moments of happiness, as friends and neighbours have to incorporate extraordinary experiences into their daily routine. { May 2005; PB, £12.99, 1572411325:9781572411326 , Ariadne Press } |
| CASANOVA'S JOURNEY HOME : and Other Late Stories [Arthur Sehnitzler; Translated by Norman Watt] The ageing Casanova, struggling in vain to regain his youth; a beautiful young Viennese socialite, compelled to sell her honour in order to save her family from disgrace; a disdainful lieutenant, driven to the edge by his compulsive gambling -- such are the characters we encounter here, all of them Schnitzler types who appear again and again, infinitely varied and delicately nuanced, throughout the author's dramas and prose works. A physician by training, Schnitzler was essentially interested only in cases involving nervous and mental disorders; he practiced medicine half-heartedly for a few years before turning exclusively to writing, and it was here that he delved deeply into the psyches of his characters and laid bare their innermost fears and desires. His contemporary Sigmund Freud recognised in Schnitzler's work an approach to the understanding of the human mind so strikingly similar to his own that he considered the writer his virtual Doppelgänger. { 270pp, 135x215mm, January 2002; PB, £18.99, 1572410744:9781572410749 , Ariadne Press } |
| CHASING AFTER THE WIND : Four Stories [Barbara Frischmuth] Barbara Frischmuth, among the most widely recognised and respected Austrian writers today, is recognised not only for her descriptive skill, but also for being a moderate feminist. In these four short tales she presents realistic portraits of women caught up in relationships determined largely by social conventions, internalised roles, and sometimes just plain bad luck. Taking her title from Ecclesiastes "All is vanity and a chasing after the wind" she presents psychologically sound studies of women protagonists' futile efforts to break out of the dead-end situations, in which they have been trapped. { 162pp, 140x215mm, January 1996; HB, £12.50, 1572410396:9781572410398 , Ariadne Press } |
| CHILD NAZI [Andreas Okopenko; Translated by Michael Mitchell] Okopenko's portrayal of a young boy during the Hitler years begins at the end, with the collapse of the Nazi Reich, then works its way back to 1939. Told from the child's perspective, it paints a vivid picture of what it was like to grow up in a state where almost everything was seen in terms of National Socialist ideology. The basic mode of realistic narration is enriched with a wide variety of stylistic devices, ranging from diary entries, school essays, lists and dramatised dialogue to abrupt switches of perspective and poetic evocations of mood. The inclusion of a large number of authentic 'objects' -- for example, songs, jokes, posters and slogans -- helps to give the reader the flavour of the period. 'Child Nazi' is about childhood and adolescence, but it is also about childhood and adolescence at a time when even the most personal thoughts and feelings were manipulated by the ruling system to bind the rising generation to Nazism and its leaders. { 139pp, 140x215mm, January 2003; PB, £10.99, 1572411163:9781572411166 , Ariadne Press } |
| CO-EXISTENT CONTRADICTIONS : Joseph Roth in Retrospect [Helen Chambers] As a socialist monarchist, Jewish Catholic, sceptical mystic, and humorous sage, Roth has never fitted neatly into any one literary or historical category. The essays in this volume, devoted to the Austrian writer Joseph Roth on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of his death in Paris in 1939, take a fresh look at his apparent contradictions and demonstrate his contemporary relevance as an acute analyst of the relationship between private life and political change. REVIEW: ""An informative and stimulating collection of essays devoted to an author who, even today, has not yet been completely understood and properly appreciated for his artistic diversity."" The German Quarterly" { 246pp, 140x215mm, March 2007; PB, £17.99, 0929497325:9780929497327 , Ariadne Press } |
| CRIME AT MAYERLING : The Life & Death of Mary Vetsera [Georg Markus] "Crime at Mayerling" deals with two of the most sensational crimes committed during the past century. Although separated in time by a hundred years, the two events are inextricably connected. In January 1889 the corpses of Archduke Rudolf, Crown Prince of Austria-Hungary, and the Baroness Mary Vetsera were discovered in the prince's hunting lodge at Mayerling, near Vienna. The circumstances were hushed up and for decades scientists and historians had been trying to solve the mystery of what had happened at Mayerling. An Austrian "Mayerling buff" felt compelled to reach an explanation in his own way: in December 1992 he stole the coffin with the Baroness's remains and had them examined by forensic specialists. Markus describes the remarkable findings which finally resolve the mystery of Mayerling. { 163pp, 140x215mm, January 1994; PB, £9.99, 0929497945:9780929497945 , Ariadne Press } |
| DARK & THE BRIGHT : Memoirs, 1911-1989 [Hilde Spiel] The author, journalist, and grand dame of Austrian literature (as she was known in her own lifetime), Hilde Spiel, was born in Vienna in 1911. She emigrated to London in 1936, returning to her Austria for the first time in 1946 as correspondent for the New Statesman. Beginning during her long years of emigration, she created a series of impressive works in both English and German novels such as Flute and Drums and The Darkened Room, her biography of Fanny von Arnstein, several volumes of stories, literary essays and critical works, as well as translations of works by renowned English poets, novelists and dramatists. For twenty years she was Austrian correspondent for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and Weltwoche, and from 1937 onward an active member of International PEN. She later became general secretary and then vice-president of Austrian PEN. In the early 1960s she resettled in Austria for good, despite her awareness that the chasm between those who had stayed at home and those who had emigrated would never again close completely. In her later years she was honoured with several important literary prizes. Her memoirs, a microcosm of literary and political life in Europe during the upheavals of the twentieth century, not only vividly portray Hilde Spiel as an individual and an intellectual of her time, but also convey the conflicting forces in the lives of Europeans during and after the years of the Second World War. { 444pp, 155x230mm, June 2008; PB, £23.50, 1572411546:9781572411548 , Ariadne Press } |
| DARK HAIRED MAN, OR THE HIEROMONK'S TALE : A Romance of Nova Europe [Robert Reginald] It is the year of Our Lord 1205, or 845 by the Julian reckoning. Two great kingdoms of Eastern Nova Europe are poised on the brink of war: Pommerelia and Kórynthia. Their differences are both religious and cultural, and not easily bridged. One state faces west and south towards the immense hereditary Latinate monarchy of the Holy Roman Cæsar, while the other reflects the growing influence of the Greek-oriented Byzantine Julian Emperor to the east. And behind the scenes, someone -- or something -- is manipulating events to bring about the seemingly inevitable calamity that will result when the hounds of fate are finally unleashed. Who is 'The Dark-Haired Man?' Is he just a fable that parents tell their little children to keep them in line? Or is he viciously real, a threat not only to King Kipriyán III and his royal line, but to all peace-loving people everywhere? What does he really want? What can he actually do with his powers? And, ultimately, of course, ultimately, how can he ever possibly be stopped by God-fearing men and women? This is a saga of high adventure, great deeds, and greater loves, played out across the razor edge of the Carpates Spinae. At the very heart of the tale is Father Afanásy, a seemingly innocuous hieromonk whose quest to find himself rocks the very foundations of the universe known as Nova Europa. His journey -- and ours -- will both move and enrich fantasy readers everywhere. { 598pp, 140x215mm, July 2004; PB, £16.99, 1572411244:9781572411241 , Ariadne Press } |
| DECISIVE MOMENTS IN HISTORY [Stefan Zweig] Contains 12 brief accounts by Stefan Zweig (1881-1942) of decisive historical moments in which an individual's will to discover, create, and transcend the limits imposed by the temporal and physical environment conflicts with the individual's inability to escape from the realities of their own nature. { 254pp, 140x215mm, January 1999; PB, £14.50, 1572410671:9781572410671 , Ariadne Press } |
| EPHEMERAL APHORISMS [Phia Rilke] The fact that many of Phia Rilke’s texts are based on her own personal experiences and are not mere linguistic and intellectual wordplays invests them with depth and significance and makes them the fascinating expression of a free spirit of the fin de siecle in Prague and Vienna. This bilingual edition of Phia Rilke’s personal reflections on her life and time adds insightful observations on the rich cultural scene to which she belonged for eight decades. { 112pp, 140x220mm, January 1998; HB, £9.99, 1572410639:9781572410633 , Ariadne Press } |
| EXILED PRINCE, OR THE ARCHQUISITOR'S TALE : A Romance of Nova Europa [Robert Reginald] It is the year of Our Lord 1450, or 1090 by the Julian reckoning. At the royal residence in Sabbedelle, capital of the French-speaking state of Neustria, a terrible crime has been committed: the king and all of his family have been massacred. The only survivors are the monarch's younger brother, Prince Théodoric, who has fled the scene and is now accused of the crime; and the king's young daughter, Princess Melissande, who has been proclaimed Queen Regnant under the regency of the head of Neustria's Romanish church, Archquisitor Grégoire Malateste. The hunt for Théo and his companions is led by the Archquisitor's only son, the Chevalier César de Tarde, whose ruthless pursuit of the prince drives both of them deep into the mysterious forests east of Sabbedelle. Who actually murdered the royal family? What are their motivations? Who stands to gain? The answers will astonish and delight fantasy readers everywhere. { 600pp, 155x230mm, July 2004; PB, £16.99, 1572411252:9781572411258 , Ariadne Press } |
| FAREWELL TO LOVE : and Other Misunderstandings [Herbert Eisenreich] Herbert Eisenreich (1925-1986) was an ironic observer of Viennese middle-class mores. His stories, which have been compared with those of Maupassant and Chekhov, are subtle, acerbic, unsentimental portraits of failed relationships, misunderstandings, momentary confrontations with life and love and death. Human suffering, according to Eisenreich, is caused not so much by social and political ills as by the human failure to communicate. { 168pp, 140x215mm, January 1993; PB, £9.99, 0929497570:9780929497570 , Ariadne Press } |
| FEBRUARY SHADOWS [Elisabeth Reichart] The central event in Hilde's childhood occurred on 2 February 1945. She was a confused but compliant girl at the time. Now she is a depressed and angry old woman, who is haunted by the memory of that shameful day. For on that day in February, the ordinary citizens of her village hunted down and murdered approximately 500 prisoners who had escaped from the concentration camp in Mauthausen. This brilliant novel renders the experiences of common people caught up in the political cyclone of the time, reminding us that history is not behind us, nor is it outside us. REVIEW: "The book gripped my attention. I had the feeling I was working on an excavation project, the results of which terrified me." -- Christa Wolf. { 162pp, 140x215mm, January 1989; PB, £9.50, 0929497023:9780929497020 , Ariadne Press } |
| FLIGHT FROM GREATNESS [Hans Weigel] This is a collection of six essays that attempt to define and illustrate what it means to be Austrian. By illuminating the lives and careers of Franz Schubert, Ferdinand Raimund, Johann Nestroy, Franz Grillparzer, Adalbert Stifter, and Johann Strauss, the author makes a case for his theses that Austria is understood neither by Austrians nor the world at large, and that consistent characteristics of Austrianness include failure to measure up to individual potential, an almost conscious avoidance of greatness, and the tendency for a career to break off before it is finished. { 341pp, 155x230mm, December 1998; PB, £15.99, 1572410515:9781572410510 , Ariande Press } |
| FRAMED BY LANGUAGE [Elfriede Jelinek] Elfriede Jelinek's wide-ranging literary production has brought her to the forefront of the Austrian literary scene. The fifteen essays collected here demonstrate the significance of this major literary voice, addressing Jelinek as a master of modernist prose, of post-modern critique of literary genres, and of stage and screen. Hers is a strong voice against domestic violence, pornography, oppression of women, and the continuance of the fascist legacy in the everyday world of contemporary Austria and Germany. Jelinek is represented in this volume with an essay on translation and is further introduced by an interview. The remaining fifteen contributions by eminent scholars from both Europe and the United States illuminate Jelinek's writings through discussions of her major works. These critical analyses of her prose and drama and their attendant bibliographies make Jelinek's fascinating and highly relevant literary world available to English-speaking readers for the first time. { 314pp, 145x225mm, July 1994; HB, £23.99, 0929497929:9780929497921 , Ariadne Press } |
| FREUD & TRAGEDY [Heinz Politzer; Translated by Michael Mitchell] The book examines Sigmund Freud's life and work, and sees tragedy as a concept of central importance in both. Politzer shows how for Freud the tragic experience -- later formulated as the Oedipus complex -- was at the root of the development of human civilization. In the light of this idea he examines Freud's interpretation of Sophocles, Shakespeare, and Michelangelo's statue Moses. He also looks at the relationship with Jung in terms of the father-son conflict. A final chapter, designated 'appendix' portrays the younger generation of the 1970's 'flower-power' movement, as a 'post-Oedipal generation'. Politzer's book is also a celebration of Sigmund Freud as a literary author in his own right. { 176pp, 140x215mm, October 2006; PB, £15.99, 1572411465:9781572411463 , Ariadne Press } |
| FROM WILSON TO WALDHEIM : Proceedings of a Workshop on Austrian-American Relations 1917-1987 [Peter Pabisch (ed)] The aim of this volume is to trace Austria's development from the end of World War I to the present. Several essays examine Austro-American relations during this century, and five of the twenty-five contributions deal with aspects of the Waldheim controversy and Austria's connection with the Third Reich. The remaining articles provide a comprehensive overview of Austrian life, politics, and culture from diverse perspectives. { 364pp, 155x230mm, December 1989; PB, £16.99, 0929497090:9780929497099 , Ariande Press } |
| IF WE HAD THE WORD : Ingeborg Bachmann, Views & Reviews [Gisela Brinker-Gabler & Markus Zisselberger (eds)] Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973) was one of the most significant post-war women writers in German language literature and remains one of the most important writers of our time. Over thirty years after her death, her work continues to attract the critical attentions of a wide general readership as well as scholars from many different disciplines, not least because her poems, short stories, critical essays, radio plays and novels deal with issues that continue to haunt contemporary culture: history, gender, exile, war, memory and the Holocaust. A poet, writer and trained philosopher, Bachmann relentlessly proved what she believed was the potential of language and writing to raise awareness and effect change in a culture marked by violence against women, individual and collective trauma, the effacement of memory, the forgetting of atrocities, and the silencing of victims. The multifaceted, interdisciplinary approaches to Ingeborg Bachmann's work make this collection appealing and relevant to both critics and scholars of Ingeborg Bachmann and to everyone interested in critical theory and contemporary culture. { 302pp, 140x215mm, January 2005; PB, £22.99, 1572411309:9781572411302 , Ariadne Press } |
| INTO THE SUNSET : Anthology of Nineteenth Century Austrian Prose [Richard Hacken] A collection of prose fiction written in Austria and Austria-Hungary in the 19th century. Seen as a whole, the fiction of the region began the 19th century as romantic flights of fancy and left that century drenched in the depressing trivia of reality. { 455pp, 155x230mm, January 1999; HB, £29.99, 1572410779:9781572410770 , Ariadne Press } |
| INTRODUCING AUSTRIA : A Short History [Lonnie Johnson] The historian Lonnie Johnson provides in compact form a comprehensive overview of Austria's rich past and present. Each chapter and subchapter approaches Austria's diverse, thousand-year-old heritage from a different perspective to illuminate its essential features. In detailing Austria's turbulent history from 1918 to the present, controversial issues are presented objectively and without oversimplification. Overall the book conveys a differentiated picture of the country and its people which gives readers a feeling for the continuity and change of the Austrian idea. { 195pp, 140x215mm, January 1989; PB, £9.99, 0929497031:9780929497037 , Ariadne Press } |
| JEWISH LIFE : Tales From Nineteenth-Century Europe [Leopold von Sacher-Masoch] This work, originally published in Mannheim in 1891, is a collection of twenty-six stories illustrating various aspect of Jewish life and culture in Europe prior to the twentieth century. Each story takes place in a different country, ranging from England to Turkey, and develops an isolated topic or theme from Jewish life, such as its holidays, cabalism, the Chasidic movement, fanaticism, secularism, etc., in a sometimes humorous, sometimes dramatic, and often sentimental fashion. While the endings are always happy, the level of historic realism in the stories is high. Jewish Life offers a richly detailed portrait of Jewish customs and culture prior to the deplorably successful attempt to destroy them during the Holocaust. { 210pp, 140x215mm, January 2002; PB, £14.99, 1572411147:9781572411142 , Ariadne Press } |
| LEIB WEIHNACHTSKUCHEN & HIS CHILD [Karl Emil Franzos] Karl Emil Franzos (1848-1904), the son of a doctor, a liberal Jew, was born in Czortkow (now Chortkiv) and grew up in Czernowitz (now Chernivsty); both towns, until 1918 part of the Habsburg Empire. He studied law, but did not want to work as an advocate; a position of judge was barred to him, as a Jew, and he refused to convert in order to advance his career. He became a journalist and edited important literary magazines in Vienna and, after 1886, in Berlin. But it was as a writer of reportage, short stories and novels set in his homeland, the area of East Galicia and the Bukovina, that he became widely known during his lifetime. His portrayal of the people of this backward area is not at all folksy local colour, but is informed by his deep humanitarian concern for the oppressed and exploited classes and nationalities. For all his knowledge of local habits and customs which informs his novels, the main emphasis in his work is on the individual. 'Leib Weihnachtskuchen and his Child' (first published in 1896), is set in East Galicia, nowadays a province of the Ukraine. It portrays a poverty-stricken Jew whose religion is personal and deeply felt and causes the inevitable tragedy to unfold. { 214pp, 130x195mm, July 2005; PB, £12.99, 1572411376:9781572411371 , Ariadne Press } |
| LIFE'S WAGER : The Story of a Viennese Civil Servant [Georg Potyka; Translated & with an Afterword by Todd C Hanlin] Georg Potyka, an Austrian civil servant in the diplomatic service, has written a novel about a fictional colleague, Leopold Navratil. Since boyhood, Navratil has been emboldened by his fantasy to fight evil and strive for good. An unspoken wager with a comrade is to determine which of them remains honourable to the end. However, to avoid conflict within the Third Reich, Navratil must struggle with his conscience and attempt to avoid compromising his ideals, as represented by the wager, while still safeguarding his family and his own existence. Though Leopold Navratil survives the war, he does not survive the peace. { 164pp, 140x215mm, September 2004; PB, £10.99, 1572411279:9781572411272 , Ariadne Press } |
| LIGHT FOR OTHERS : and Other Jewish Tales From Galicia [Leopold von Sacher-Masoch] Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (1836-1895), whose name has been immortalised in the term masochism, is known today predominantly for his novel 'Venus in Furs' and for his tales of dominant women and suffering men. This collection features some of his best-known Jewish tales which display the author's warm sense of humanity as well as his considerable sense of humour. Sacher-Masoch's unusual ability to capture the essence of a person or place with a telling detail brings the vanished world of Galician Jewry back to life in all its splendour and squalor, mixing the greys, browns, and blacks of European Realism with the bright, sparkling colours of legend, myth, fairy tale, and tradition. { 338pp, 140x215mm, October 1994; PB, £17.50, 0929497937:9780929497938 , Ariadne Press } |
| LIGHTED WINDOWS [Heimito von Doderer] Widowed and newly retired, the turn-of-the-century Austrian civil servant Julius Zihal has left the safe haven of the Tax Office and its orderly, codified administrative practices and now faces a drab and uncertain future alone. This gloomy scene suddenly becomes brighter when he discovers that the lighted windows of the adjacent apartment buildings offer a nightly display of variously-endowed ladies undressing as they prepare for bed. The expected Jekyll and Hyde contrast between Julius' Biedermeier daytime conduct and his nocturnal activities never quite materialises as the bureaucrat within him dominates the voyeur and he attempts to open a file on Eros, as it were, by carefully noting down and categorising all the pertinent details of his observations, rather than simply surrendering to their pleasures." { 136pp, 140x215mm, December 2000; PB, £9.99, 1572410817:9781572410817 , Ariande Press } |
| LONG-FORGOTTEN EVENTS FROM IMPERIAL AUSTRIA [Jakob Ludwig Heller; Edited by Antonie Neumann] The time for autobiographies has arrived. Interest in authentic life stories seems greater than ever, even greater than well written works of fiction, because readers begin to recognise that nothing is more fantastic than the complicated reality through which we are forced to make our way. Accounts of everyday life have long since become a source of historic insight, and even historians are beginning to admit that concrete vignettes of an autobiographer's life are often better able to portray what the past was really like. All of this holds true for the memoirs of Jakob Ludwig Heller, who lived in the Austro-Hungarian Empire during the 19th and 20th centuries. The records that he left behind reveal that nostalgic individuals were not far wrong in viewing the Empire and its era as the quintessence of an intact world. Of course things were not as peaceful and happy for everyone in the Danube monarchy, but compared with today's world, Jakob Ludwig Heller's milieu was a true idyll, where marriages endured, family ties were strong, hard work was rewarded, and people rejoiced over simple social gatherings. Upbringing was strict, but caring, the children were well behaved, and earning a living was fun. Long live progress! The feeling that what he describes is lost forever is magnified further by the fact that he grew up in a Jewish, Central European milieu, where Jews perhaps did not live without tensions among neighbours of other faiths, but did live without being persecuted, robbed, and murdered. Not only Jewish readers will regret the loss of that normal way of life. Near the end of his memoirs, in retrospect the diarist complains about the inexplicable intrusions of lax morals, the disappearance of fixed norms, and the lack of the earlier, ever-present feeling of security and continuity. What would he say today? But what makes the reading of this simple story so rewarding, apart from the historic information, is the intelligent, humorous, warm-hearted man who is encountered on every page. His comments about the First World War are especially touching. Despite his extensive life experience, they betray his naïve belief in Germany and Austria, in the government and the army. He is convinced that the Central Powers fight for a just cause at a time when Karl Kraus is writing “The Last Days of Mankind”. But in those days the great satirist was still quite alone with his opinion. Most of the Jews, even most of the people, probably felt as did Jakob Ludwig Heller. And the waning of those certainties is the greatest tragedy of all, a sign of the insurmountable distance between our world and that of the past. { 295pp, 155x230mm, December 2005; PB, £21.50, 1572411449:9781572411449 , Ariadne Press } |
| LOVE : The Legacy of Cain [Leopold von Sacher Masoch] Four novellas taken from two cycles of novellas entitled Die Liebe and Das Vermeachtnis Kains. { 187pp, 140x215mm, January 2003; PB, £12.99, 1572411198:9781572411197 , Ariadne Press } |
| MAJOR FIGURES OF MODERN AUSTRIAN LITERATURE [Donald G Daviau (ed)] The fifteen essays cover the life and works of the major authors representing the generation who began their literary careers before Word War 2, were driven into exile or into inner emigration during the years of annexation (1938-1945), and attained full prominence in the post-war period. { 481pp, 140x215mm, December 1988; HB, £26.99, 0929497007:9780929497006 , Ariadne Press } |
| MAJOR FIGURES OF TURN-OF-THE-CENTURY AUSTRIAN LITERATURE : The Inter-War Years 1918-1938 [Donald C Daviau (ed)] The purpose of this projected seven-volume series is to help make the major figures of Austrian literature from 1800 to the present accessible to an English-speaking audience. The introductions provide an overview of the cultural and political background of the age to furnish a broader context for the individual contributions. Bibliographies of primary and secondary texts enhance the value of the volumes as reference works. This volume covers the turbulent period between the two world wars. Despite the hardships endured by a country recovering from a severe war, and despite the prominence of politics, literature flourished to a degree that, surprisingly perhaps, makes this era one of the richest periods in Austrian literary history. { 488pp, 140x220mm, January 1991; HB, £29.99, 0929497309:9780929497303 , Ariadne Press } |
| MARIETTA BLAU: STARS OF DISINTEGRATION : Biography of a Pioneer of Particle Physics [Brigitte Strohmaier & Robert Rosner] This book depicts the life of the Austrian physicist Marietta Blau (1894-1970). She was considered extraordinarily gifted by Albert Einstein and was nominated three times for the Nobel Prize in Physics, twice by Erwin Schrödinger. On the other hand, no obituary was ever published on her. At the Institut für Radiumforschung in Vienna, the 'Radium Institute', Marietta Blau developed the photographic method of detecting nuclear particles, a method which played a prominent part in nuclear physics in the following decades. By means of this technique new fundamental particles, the pion and the K-meson, were discovered in the 1940s. The biographical part of the book which includes personal recollections by friends, describes Marietta Blau's life in Vienna before 1938, her emigration to Mexico, her move to the USA in 1944, her work at leading research centers in the US, her return to Vienna in 1960, and the last decade of her life in her hometown, where she continued to work at the Radium Institute for four years. One article is dedicated to her scientific work. Her pre-war research culminated in the discovery of 'disintegration stars', which consist of the tracks of nuclei or nuclear fragments on photographic plates, and made visible for the first time the reactions of atomic nuclei with particles of cosmic radiation. A bibliography of Marietta Blau's scientific publications as well as references to selected literature are also included. Brigitte Strohmaier, born in Vienna in 1948, teaches at the Institut für Isotopenforschung und Kernphysik of the University of Vienna (formerly Institut für Radiumforschung of the Austrian Academy of Sciences). { 220pp, 140x215mm, June 2006; PB, £17.99, 1572411473:9781572411470 , Ariadne Press } |
| MEMOIRS FROM A MADHOUSE [Christine Lavant; Introduction & Afterword by Annette Steinsiek & Ursula Schneider; Translated by Renate Latimer] Christine Lavant (1915-1973), one of Austria's most famous yet obscure 20th century poets, wrote these memoirs during a voluntary six-week stay in an asylum. Although written in 1946 the memoirs were not published until 2001 because the poet felt that the work was too personal. She records her failed suicide attempt, her sleeplessness, her exhaustion, her eccentric and mad inmates, her daily struggle to survive by writing. The author spent most of her life in a small southern Austrian village, where she was born as the ninth child in a family of miners. Pathologically introverted, she was plagued by poverty and illness and supported herself with knitting. Her poetry is unconventional, filled with neologisms, mysterious and magical. We hear echoes of Rilke, whom she admired. Thomas Bernhard referred to her work as testimony to a "zerstörte Welt/destroyed world". She was honoured with numerous literary awards, among them the Austrian State Prize for Literature in 1970, three years before her death. { 106pp, 145x220mm, February 2005; PB, £11.99, 1572411228:9781572411227 , Ariadne Press } |
| NARRATIVES OF LOVING RESISTANCE : Two Stories [Erich Hackl; Translated by Edward T Larkin] The two stories contained in this edition -- 'Love at First Sight: A Recollection' and 'History of a Promise' -- reveal Erich Hackl's unique and luminous perspective on the relationship between historical reality and literary representation. Drawing on historical documents and authentic individuals, Hackl portrays the inspiring lives of those who have suffered the terror and injustice of twentieth-century fascism. Recovering from a wound sustained as a result of his involvement with the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War, the Austrian Karl Sequens falls in love with Herminia Roudière Perpiñá, a strong and scrupulous Spanish woman who cared for him in the hospital. The story of their brief but enduring love both for each other and for social justice is narrated through the memory of their daughter Rosa María in 'Love at First Sight: A Recollection'. In his touching portrait of the fate of these non-fictional individuals, Erich Hackl illuminates an alternate perspective on Austria's position in the frenzied social and political configurations that mark Europe from the 1920s to the 1990s. In "History of a Promise," the mind of the septuagenarian protagonist Willi retraces a path from his poverty in the Vienna of the First Republic through his internment in the concentration camps to his entrepreneurial success in his chosen South American exile as he reveals for the first time a promise that he had made. { 106pp, 140x215mm, October 2006; PB, £8.99, 1572411384:9781572411388 , Ariadne Press } |
| ON ARCHITECTURE [Adolf Loos] Adolf Loos (1870-1933) is recognised today as one of the great masters of modern architecture. He did not leave a unified oeuvre but articles scattered through journals and newspapers. { 203pp, January 2002; PB, £15.99, 1572410981:9781572410985 , Ariadne Press } |
| ORNAMENT & CRIME : Selected Essays [Adolf Loos; Translated by Michael Mitchell] Contains thirty-six original essays by the celebrated Viennese architect, Adolf Loos (1870-1933). Most deal with questions of design in a wide range of areas, from architecture and furniture, to clothes and jewellery, pottery, plumbing, and printing; others are polemics on craft education and training, and on design in general. Loos, the great cultural reformer and moralist in the history of European architecture and design was always a 'revolutionary against the revolutionaries'. With his assault on Viennese arts and crafts and his conflict with bourgeois morality, he managed to offend the whole country. His 1908 essay 'Ornament and Crime', mocked by an age in love with its accessories, has come to be recognised as a seminal work in combating the aesthetic imperialism of the turn of the century. Today Loos is recognised as one of the great masters of modern architecture. { 204pp, 140x215mm, January 1998; PB, £13.99, 1572410469:9781572410466 , Ariadne Press } |
| OTHERS' AUSTRIA : Impressions of American & British Travellers [Horst Jarka & Lois Jarka (eds)] The attractiveness of Austria has long made it into a desirable travel destination for European and American visitors. People came to enjoy the beautiful landscapes, and many were so captivated by the enchanting atmosphere that they wrote down their impressions. This anthology of original texts, offering a look at Austria from the outside, is unique in that it gives a picture of the entire German-speaking part of the Monarchy in the 19th century, not only Vienna. The editors have collected informative accounts from letters, journals, newspaper articles and books written by more than fifty American or British travellers -- including famous names like Washington Irving, Frances Trollope, Longfellow, Sir Humphry Davy, Asa Gray, Mark Twain, Henry Adams, and D H Lawrence -- which give a colourful account of the rich tapestry of Austria ranging from its natural beauty to its social and political life, often challenging the conventional image of Austria. This history of travel from stagecoach and river boat to train travel reflects Austria's political history as witnessed by foreign visitors. It traces the dual image of Austria abroad that still prevailed in the twentieth century: a country of dramatic politics and natural beauty. It documents the fascinating development of Austria into a major tourist country in the modern sense. { 435pp, 140x215mm, January 2006; PB, £26.50, 1572411406:9781572411401 , Ariadne Press } |
| OUT FROM THE SHADOWS : Essays on Contemporary Austrian Women Writers & Filmmakers [Margarete Lamb-Faffelberger] The essays in this book document how the impressive body of literary works and films created by women writers and filmmakers has greatly enriched the Austrian cultural scene since 1945. Their contributions, however, were only marginally recognised during the 1950s and early 1960s and remained hidden within the shadows of the body of art created by their male counterparts in the process of re-establishing Austria's post-World War II cultural identity. The situation changed during the 1970s, when the literary and film texts of the younger generation began to strongly assert feminist views and issues. The texts of contemporary Austrian women writers and filmmakers were directed towards social and ethnic consciousness-raising and are united by their radically new use of language. { 306pp, 140x215mm, January 1997; HB, £24.99, 157241037X:9781572410374 , Ariadne Press } |
| OVER ALL THE MOUNTAIN TOPS [Thomas Bernhard; Translated & with an Afterword by Michael Mitchell] This play is Thomas Bernhard's devastating satire on the business of literature. The novelist Moritz Meister, after years of neglect, has finally achieved the status of Grand Old Man of German literature. With breathtaking regal condescension he receives his minions: a graduate student writing a thesis on him, a journalist preparing an adulatory article, his publisher arranging the publication of his magnum opus. He regales them -- and the audience -- with noble high-flown thoughts on art and life, while exploiting his situation to the full to gain honours and material comforts. { 104pp, 140x215mm, February 2005; PB, £11.50, 1572411287:9781572411289 , Ariadne Press } |
| PERSON MADE OF PORCELAIN & OTHER STORIES [Heimito von Doderer] In his eminence, his iconic status, and his masterful command of enormous fictional realms in several huge novels, Heimito von Doderer (1896-1966) still enjoys legendary status close to forty years after his death. The daunting scope of his novels -- his magnum opus is over 1300 pages long! -- has tended to obscure his achievement as a writer of shorter fiction, even in the German-speaking world. Doderer came to esteem his brief stories and tales quite highly, and he took special pride in condensing whole plots and conflicts into one-sentence fictions. By turns playful and poignant, grotesque and idyllic, the short fiction merits a wider audience. { 288pp, 140x215mm, November 2005; PB, £16.99, 1572411414:9781572411418 , Ariadne Press } |
| PLAYS & POEMS [Oskar Kokoschka; Translated by Michael Michell] The well-known painter, Oskar Kokoschka, also produced a considerable and significant body of literary work: plays, a few poems, essays and autobiographical stories. The present volume contains all his plays ( some in more than one version) and the poems, plus one short prose passage. All the pieces in this collection, apart from the play Comenius, were written in the period 1907-1918. The plays, despite Kokoschka’s dislike of the term, reflect the style of Expressionism current in Germany during the period. Indeed, the early ones anticipated and, to as certain extent, helped to define Expressionism. { 250pp, 140x215mm, January 2001; HB, £22.50, 1572410418:9781572410411 , Ariadne Press } |
| POSTWAR AUSTRIAN THEATER : Text & Performance [Linda Demeritt & Margarete Lamb-Faffelberger] This collection of seventeen articles offers an investigation of some of the most important voices from Austria's theatre world between 1945 and 2001. They are for the most part critical voices engaged in the constantly evolving redefinition of a political state and its private citizens, undermining the status quo and the general complacency. They include both writers, producers and directors, for the written word must take shape on stage and the real debate of drama takes place in a public space. Therefore this volume attempts to include issues of staging and reception where possible. Taken as a whole this volume is intended to show the incredible richness and variety of the theatre scene in Austria. { 378pp, 140x215mm, January 2002; PB, £25.50, 1572411074:9781572411074 , Ariadne Press } |
| PRINCE OF DARKNESS [Erika Mitterer; Translated by Catherine Hutter] The Prince of Darkness', written by Erika Mitterer (1906-2001) in 1939, is a veiled criticism of the contemporary political system. It was meant to show how evil can rise and take hold of people who are not intrinsically bad but let themselves be carried away by indifference. The novel offers an extraordinary panoramic tapestry of early-sixteenth century life in pre-Reformation Germany. It was the time of decline for the nobility, of peasant revolts, of the rise of mercantile capitalism, of free-thinking scholars, artists and scientists and of the Inquisition. Theresa, one of the two protagonists, is suspected of sorcery because of simple acts of everyday kindness and is eventually burned at the stake as a witch. Her sister, Maria Michaela, who had entered the convent and became tots prioress, let herself be manipulated by her father confessor. Readers experience and come to understand how the winds of mass hysteria and frustration can sway a solid citizenry to vicious gossip and acts of madness, of revenge by denunciation, of denunciation for reward, splitting lovers and families, as the one intellectual in the novel stand by helplessly. So striking was this element of the book it its implicit association with the Hitler regime that, after its publication in Norway, a sudden absence of paper prevented it from being republished in Germany. { 676pp, 155x230mm, January 2005; HB, £43.50, 1572411341:9781572411340 , Ariadne Press } |
| PROFESSOR BERNHARDI & OTHER PLAYS [Translated by G J Weinberger] Long considered one of Arthur Schnitzler's greatest accomplishments, Professor Bernhardi brings together its author's treatment of anti-Semitism, an important social problem in Austria then and now, and his penetrating study of its title character. A difficult, complex hero in the mould of Ibsen's Thomas Stockman, Bernhardi is made to suffer from the reaction to his ethical, humane decision to ease a dying girl's suffering, by people whose principles are not always as high as his own. The Comedy of Words treats a favourite theme of Schnitzler's, the misuse of language, while Fink and Fliederbusch stands out as one of the few genuine and enduring comedies in German literature. { 379pp, 155x230mm, January 1993; PB, £18.99, 0929497708:9780929497709 , Ariadne Press } |
| RETURN TO THE CENTER [Otto von Habsburg] Otto von Habsburg, who is presently serving as President of the Pan-Europa Union, presents a series of essays examining the problems facing all of the major countries of Central and Eastern Europe since the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. Their situation is discussed in the light of relevant historical events and ethnic, political, and economic relationships during and after the time of the Holy Roman Empire up to the present. Areas of possible conflict are analysed and the factors necessary for their solution are outlined. This is a timely, comprehensive study of the European community that contributes to an understanding of the problems facing Europe and the world today. { 227pp, 140x215mm, January 1993; PB, £15.99, 0929497392:9780929497396 , Ariadne Press } |
| SAUDADE : The Life & Death of Queen Maria Gloria of Lusitania [Gloria Kaiser] In 1831 a young princess is forced to leave her home in Brazil and follow her father into exile. After the forcible overthrow of her tyrannical uncle, she is crowned Queen of Portugal and dutifully and bravely lives out an existence that is informed by painful experiences -- spiritual loneliness, revolts and opposition to her rule, the early death of her own 'Prince Charming', the discovery of her second husband’s infidelity, the infant deaths of some of her children -- and by saudade, the peculiarly Portuguese, melancholy yearning for lost roots and ties that cannot be recovered, a longing that ultimately proves fatal. { 334pp, 140x215mm, April 2005; PB, £18.99, 157241135X:9781572411357 , Ariadne Press } |
| SEARCH FOR M [Doron Rabinovici] The plot of "The Search for M" revolves around the lives in contemporary Vienna of two generations of European Jews, the survivors of the Holocaust and their children. Members of the first generation of survivors, their own sense of identity severely undermined by history, are capable of passing on to their offspring only a very fragile sense of worth and belonging. The lives of two main characters of the second generation illustrate the result of this legacy. Dani Morgenthau's sense of self boundaries is so weak that he suffers as an adult from a pathological compulsion to claim the guilt of criminals. Arieh Arthur Bein exploits a similar psychological defect in his work as an agent for the Israeli secret service. With only the barest of evidence to go on, he seeks out and exposes enemies of the Israeli state, setting them up for the assassin's bullet. The novel reaches for at least a tentative resolution when the lives of these two figures intersect. { 192pp, 135x210mm, August 2000; PB, £12.99, 1572410884:9781572410886 , Ariadne Press } |
| SERPENT'S CHILD [Peter Truschner; Translated by Michael Winkler] A coming-of-age novel that is set in a farming village near Klagenfurt and in Salzburg, Austria during the later 1970s. Its sure sense of place and time and its psychological acuity suggest the intimacy of autobiographical experience that knows how traditions of patriarchal abuse and the dictates of conformity disfigure a seemingly idyllic milieu. A person of inquisitive intelligence, Truschner's protagonist observes the dynamics of dysfunctional relationships with the dispassionate objectivity of an outsider and the tenderness of a wounded, disoriented sensitivity in search of human closeness. { 160pp, 140x215mm, October 2006; PB, £11.50, 1572411368:9781572411364 , Ariadne Press } |
| SIBERIA & OTHER PLAYS [Felix Mitterer] Mitterer's plays confront human suffering and oppression with an honesty and directness that is often painful for theatre audiences. Siberia is a metaphor for survival under the most adverse conditions. This moving monologue represents one old man's struggle for dignity in a retirement home. Visiting Hours is a collection of one-act plays, showing various "inmates" and their tenuous connections to the world outside. There's No Finer Country documents the betrayal of a local Jewish citizen to the Nazis. Stigma is a historical drama of faith and superstition, of exorcism and torture, of humanity and unspeakable cruelty. This collection, the first in English translation, offers a spirited sampling of Mitterer's most representative works from 1982 to the present. { 378pp, 140x215mm, January 1994; PB, £18.99, 0929497686:9780929497686 , Ariadne Press } |
| SLACKERS & OTHER PLAYS [Peter Turrini] Turrini's theatre works extend far beyond their Austrian origins in expressing the hopes, frustrations, and hypocrisies of life in the modern world. The plays contained in this volume -- A Crazy Day, Joseph and Mary, A Social Engagement, and The Slackers -- offer English-speaking readers a representative sampling of Turrini's work. As varied as they may seem, two unifying threads run through them all: Turrini's use of language to admonish society and his articulation of the element of tragedy which informs and defines modern man in his isolation. { 232pp, 140x215mm, January 1992; PB, £14.50, 0929497481:9780929497488 , Ariadne Press } |
| STEFAN ZWEIG : Exil und Suche nach dem Weltfrieden [Mark H Gelber & Klaus Zelewitz] Text in English & German. This volume contains the presentations given at the International Stefan Zweig Congress, held in Salzburg in February 1992. The essays are organised in five separate groups, each centring on a topic of concern to Zweig scholarship: war and peace, writing in exile, Jewishness and exile, the biographical writings from exile, and the stations of exile. An appendix contains additional congress-related informational material. Three of the essays are in English, the remainder in German. { 345pp, 155x230mm, December 1995; PB, £27.99, 1572410116:9781572410114 , Ariande Press } |
| STORIES FROM MY LIFE [Oskar Kokoschka] The author was one of the major Expressionist painters of the first half of the 20th century, and also wrote a number of plays, poems, and stories. These autobiographical writings, first written for his wife, are an intense evocation of incidents and moments which reveal his spiritual development. Translated from 'Das schriftliche Werk'. Oskar Kokoschka's Stories from My Life is not a traditional autobiography. There is no attempt to produce a comprehensive account of the details of his life, to record where he went, what he did, or whom he met. Instead he has given us, Kokoschka says, "a random selection of stories from my life, just as they occur to me." "Random" is perhaps an exaggeration. What these stories do provide is an inner autobiography, an intense and vivid evocation of incidents and moments which, while often apparently trivial in themselves, reveal the spiritual development of an artist who was not only one of this century's great painters, but also one of its great humanists. { 294pp, 140x215mm, January 1998; HB, £19.99, 1572410620:9781572410626 , Ariadne Press } |
| TALES FROM THE VIENNA WOODS & OTHER PLAYS [Odon von Horvath] Ödön von Horváth (1901-1939) is one of the most important theatre writers in the 1930s. His reputation rests largely on the four plays in this collection, which he called Volksstücke (popular plays), although he had no desire to embrace this tradition uncritically. Reflected in these plays is the sympathy for the situation of the exploited classes, as well as the concern for the way language is used for deception and self-deception. The hollow characters come across as potentially receptive to fascism. A latent brutality is unmasked, a lack of genuine feeling -- all lying hidden under a veneer of facile sentimentality. { 243pp, 140x215mm, January 2002; PB, £16.99, 1572411082:9781572411081 , Ariadne Press } |
| TANTE JOLESCH OR THE DECLINE OF THE WEST IN ANECDOTES [Friedrich Torberg. Translated by Maria Poglitsch Bauer. Edited by Sonat Birnecker Hart] Already a much loved classic in Austria, "Tante Jolesch or the Decline of the West in Anecdotes" is Friedrich Torberg's tribute to the Jewish coffee-house world that flourished in Vienna in the afterglow of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until its final collapse in 1938. Based on Torberg's personal memories of intellectuals and eccentrics of the time, including Egon Friedell, Fritz Grünbaum, Egon Erwin Kisch, Alfred Polgar, and Franz Werfel, this work evokes the storytelling and humour prominent among Vienna's coffee-house denizens. These anecdotes allow one to see into the lives of assimilated Jews before the Shoah, beginning in the living room of Tante Jolesch, revolving around the coffee-house, and extending to summer resorts, sports matches, dinner parties, a psychiatric clinic under the care of Sigmund Freud, and the office of a U.S. consular official in charge of granting visas to the United States. In this volume, Torberg builds a literary monument to a group of people, a time, and a culture of which he saw himself as one of the last representatives. Despite being one of the most prominent Austrian literary figures of the twentieth century, Friedrich Torberg is not well known in the English-speaking world. He joined the literary elite of pre-war Austria at the age of twenty-two, but his career was cut short by the Nazi ban on Jewish writers. Invited by the New York PEN Club as one of "ten outstanding German anti-Nazi writers", Torberg was able to flee to the United States where he wrote screenplays and articles for German-language newspapers. In 1951 Torberg returned to Vienna, where he became a journalist, critic, and translator. In 1979 he received the Austrian State Prize for Literature. { 240pp, 140x215mm, May 2008; PB, £15.99, 157241149X:9781572411494 , Ariadne Press } |
| THREE RADIO PLAYS [Ingeborg Bachmann] Each play deals with a certain aspect of our human condition, embedded in the framework of the world around us. In "The Good God of Manhattan," for example Jan, a man "from the Old World" encounters Jennifer, a woman "from the new world" in Manhattan, where they fall prey to the perils of love and share the fate of lovers throughout time and place. "The Cicadas" is the tale of the "marooned" where the isolation of the island as an escape from the real world is symbolised in the Cicada's song. Though the setting is never stated explicitly in "A Deal with Dreams," we assume it is Vienna, the "City of Dreams." Here, dreams are for sale in a shady "deal" offered in the dim light of a pawnshop on a city street. In the end, we learn that the price of dreams is high. { 222pp, 155x230mm, January 1999; PB, £14.50, 1572410795:9781572410794 , Ariadne Press } |
| TIGER IN THE TANK : An Austrian Advertising Guru [Ernest Dichter] This is an expanded English edition of the book 'Tiger in the Tank' that was first published in German in 2002. It is a compilation of interviews and essays pertaining to the life and life's work of Ernest Dichter, a Jewish Austrian who came to the United States before the Second World War and became famous as an advertising consultant whose techniques of motivational research set standards for the field of advertising that endured for decades. The interviews and essays illuminate his educational development, family and professional relationships, his research strategies and their practical application, interesting events and experiences of his life, and the personality of a man whose career impacted the lives of millions of people. { 214pp, 140x215mm, March 2007; PB, £17.50, 157241152X:9781572411524 , Ariadne Press } |
| VERBAL & VISUAL ART OF ALFRED KUBIN [Phillip H Rhein] Alfred Kubin (1877-1959) was an artist who fought against innumerable odds to learn his craft and to find his medium and his audience. Although in both his life and his art he often exhibited a capricious disregard for causality and revelled in inconsistencies, his work conveys his determination to interpret, analyse, and illuminate the world as he saw it. He felt that his own being was ravaged by a struggle between the demands of logic and the seduction of imagination. His life ranged between these polarities, and his finest art was created during those moments when he brought the two extremes into balance. { 179pp, 140x225mm, July 1989; HB, £16.99, 0929497015:9780929497013 , Ariadne Press } |
| VIENNA : The Past in Present [Inge Lehne & Lonnie Johnson] The best access to Vienna is through its history. This chronologically organised survey of Vienna from its origins to the present does not presuppose any detailed knowledge of Central European history. The book covers cultural, political and social influences. { 194pp, 140x215mm, January 1995; PB, £10.99, 1572410183:9781572410183 , Ariadne Press } |
| VIENNESE SHORT STORIES [Veza Canetti] The rediscovery of the writings of Veza Canetti (1897-1963) was one of the literary events of the 1990s in German-speaking Europe. In her stories Canetti shows a taste for the grotesque, a commitment to the underdog, a forensic understanding of the psychology of wives trapped in traditional marriages, as well as wit and irony. "Viennese Short Stories" assembles the fiction Canetti published in her lifetime between 1932-1937 aside from her two novels ("The Yellow Street" and "The Tortoises"). These stories appeared in Viennese newspapers, first the socialistic Arbeiter-Zeitung and, after its closure, in exile journals and, finally, adopting a rather different tone and style, in the censored press of the "corporate state" under Chancellor Kurt von Schuschnigg. She writes about women as wives, daughters, and employees, about working-class children who are taught the harsh rules of middle-class life at an early age, about the street violence during the workers' revolt in February 1934, and the lowly status of maids. Her favourite pseudonym, Veza Magd (maid), showed her allegiance to this marginalised group, whose sense of ethics underscores their dignity, which Canetti champions. She has an acute eye for the dynamics of power in human relationships, be they based on differences in class or sex or both. She is moralistic and engaged but funny; her stories are traditional rather than Chekhovian in their twists of plot and use of the final punchline. In his introduction Julian Preece shows how Veza Canetti was an unrivalled observer of the life of the Viennese poor on the eve of Nazism. Until now Veza Canetti's literary career was overshadowed by her more famous husband, Elias Canetti (1905-1994, Nobel Prize, 1981). His failure to tell the world of her work until shortly before his death, made her two novels, three plays, and short stories even more intriguing. { 119pp, 140x215mm, October 2006; PB, £9.50, 1572411481:9781572411487 , Ariadne Press } |
| WALK ABOUT THE VILLAGES : A Dramatic Poem [Peter Handke] This is the fourth part of Handke's "homecoming cycle", whose other three parts can be found under the American title "A Slow Homecoming". The underlying story line could not be simpler. The "prodigal" writer Gregor returns to his home village. He and his brother Hans, a construction worker, and his shopkeeper sister have a dispute over the disposition of the house which the parents had built and the land which they had cleared with their own hands many years before. Within this straightforward conflict, Handke touches upon almost every aspect of our existence. It is a lyrical play, a poetic drama on the order of Thornton Wilder's Our Town, and Dylan Thomas' Under Milk Wood. It is an "Everyman and Everywoman" dramatic poem for our time. { 153pp, 140x215mm, January 1996; PB, £9.99, 1572410000:9781572410008 , Ariadne Press } |
| WHAT PEOPLE CALL PESSIMISM : Freud, Schnitzler & 19th Century Controversy at the University of Vienna [Mark Luprecht] "The ideas were in the air", is an oft-heard expression, particularly when there is a striking intersection of ideas as was the case in the works of Freud and Schnitzler. Luprecht establishes the University of Vienna Medical School as a significant source of these thinkers' shared intellectual views. Many of Freud's scientific concepts have already been traced to his medical education. But this book makes a convincing case for crediting the University of Vienna Medical School with a far deeper and more extensive influence on Freud and Schnitzler than has previously been recognised. { 172pp, 140x215mm, December 1991; PB, £14.99, 0929497287:9780929497280 , Ariande Press } |
| WILD WOMAN & OTHER PLAYS [Felix Mitterer] This second volume of Felix Mitterer's plays in English trans-lation offers further evidence of this dramatist's powerful artistry. A mythological Wild Woman changes the lives of five wood-cutters, exposing their loneliness and desperation. Home reiterates the dictum that "you can't go home again", especially where prej-udice, brutality, and hatred reside. An historical drama based on actual court records, Children of the Devil depicts institutional superstition and cruelty as perpetuated upon the most vulnerable members of society, its children. One Everyman is a modern ver-sion of the traditional medieval morality play, complete with a Devil from Wall Street, while the Biblical analogy, Abraham, concerns the scourge of AIDS -- but even more, the love between a father and his son. The Austrian playwright Felix Mitterer, born in 1948 in the Tyrol, is one of today's leading European dramatists. His two four-part television series, "Piefke-Saga" and "Verkaufte Heimat" were seen by millions of viewers in the German-speaking coun-tries. { 442pp, 155x230mm, August 1995; PB, £18.99, 1572410027:9781572410022 , Ariadne Press } |
| WINTER QUARTERS [Evelyn Grill; Translated & with an Afterword by Jean M Snook] As a small Austrian town prepares for its 1000-year jubilee, the quiet life of Roswitha, a 42-year-old tailor, is completely disrupted. There is dust and dirt everywhere because the outside of the building she lives in is being resurfaced. In the midst of the noise and chaos, one of the construction workers introduces himself and quickly moves in with her. Roswitha has to deal with escalating episodes of drunkeness and vandalism. She has almost decided that Max will have to go, when his friends and hers crowd into her apartment to watch a sensational event across the way. As the event drags on through the night and into the next day, the situation in the apartment becomes increasingly intolerable. By the time the crisis outside is resolved, two people lie dead in Roswitha's apartment. { 124pp, 140x215mm, July 2004; PB, £9.50, 1572411236:9781572411234 , Ariadne Press } |
| WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART : January, 27 1756 -- 5 December 5, 1791 [Gloria Kaiser] The world is familiar with Mozart the composer, but in his private life he lived a variety of other roles: husband, father, son, and cousin, among others. The intent of Gloria Kaiser's edited and adapted collection of excerpts from his personal correspondence is to present an intimate creative revelation of Mozart the man from perspectives other than the one from which he is commonly viewed. Within that representation of a great, yet tragic existence, the famous composer emerges as a human being whose emotions and experiences are not far removed from our own. { 102pp, 140x215mm, August 2007; PB, £8.99, 1572411597:9781572411593 , Ariadne Press } |
| WOMEN'S WORDS, WOMEN'S WORKS : An Anthology of Contemporary Austrian Plays for Women [Udo Borgert] This is the first anthology in English devoted entirely to contemporary Austrian drama written by women. The selection begins with Clara S. (A Musical Tragedy) by the Büchner-prize winning Elfriede Jelinek, which examines the female artist's existence in a society where artistic genius is coded male and women are relegated to subordinate positions. Gerlinde Obermeir's San Francisco of Course is a series of short episodes depicting the fate of a woman whose world collapses in the face of brutal, norm-setting patriarchal oppression. Marlene Streeruwitz's New York. New York. is a mixture of tragedy, comedy and farce, a collage of highly choreographed everyday and surreal scenes, quotations and filmic and acoustic elements highlighting the tran-historical continuation of the exploitative patterns inherent in social structures, in which men possess and exert all the power. Michaela Ronzoni's 610 Bedford Drive -- I'm an American centres on a lengthy and bitter dispute between the culturally refined European thinker and writer Franz Werfel and the brash and impatient American dramatist Clifford Odets. Finally Margret Kreidl's Grateful Women (A Comedy) is like a prose-poem in which the three female characters act out a set of female rituals, interspersed with memories, fantasies, crises and unresolved desires. At times conventional, at times experimental, the selected plays provide a representative overview of the variety and diversity of women's drama in Austria from the early eighties to the present. { 264pp, 140x215mm, January 2001; PB, £18.50, 1572411066:9781572411067 , Ariadne Press } |
| WORKS OF PETER HANDKE : International Perspectives [David Coury & Frank Pilipp] Since his now famous appearance on the literary stage in 1968 novelist, playwright and poet Peter Handke has remained on the forefront of the literary vanguard, having earned the praise and recognition of critics in Europe and North America alike. In fact in a review essay of September 2000 The New York Review of Books called him 'the premier prose stylist in the German language, and one of post-war Europe’s most recognisable literary figures'. Since the publication of his early theatrical works, Handke has gone on to publish over twenty-five prose novels as well as additional works for the theatre, collections of poetry, diaries and essays. His works have ranged in style from the French influenced nouveau roman of the late 1960s to works characteristic of the New Subjectivity movement in West Germany in the 1970s, while his novels and stories of the 1980s and 1990s exhibited a new-found appreciation for narrative and issues of storytelling. He has also published a series of polemical essays on the war in Yugoslavia which have been criticised severely by scholars and intellectuals. This collection of fourteen essays focuses both on the genres in which Handke has written as well as on the thematic aspects of his work. { 400pp, 140x215mm, October 2005; PB, £25.99, 1572411392:9781572411395 , Ariadne Press } |
| WORLD-FIXER [Thomas Bernhard] This translation of Thomas Bernhard's Der Weltverbesserer makes a contemporary masterpiece available to English language readers for the first time. While echoing the dramatic works of Samuel Becket, Heiner Müller and Peter Handke, The World-Fixer is quintessentially Bernardian and one of his most stage-worthy plays. Presenting a theme he would explore in the play Ritter Dene Voss and the novels Wittgenstein's Nephew and The Loser, The World-Fixer revolves around a self-centred, self-styled genius loosely patterned on Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. The protagonist is the author of an obscure philosophical tract ostensibly designed to improve the condition of the world, if the world could only understand it. Over the course of a day he looks forward to receiving an honorary degree while reflecting on his life and engaging in dysfunctional banter. Combining absurdist comedy with an astute satire of academic pomposity, “The World-Fixer” ultimately gives a moving portrait of simple human frailty. { December 2005; HB, £11.50, 1572411422:9781572411425 , Ariadne Press } |