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While England Sleeps

David Leavitt Mariner Books, 1995 ISBN: 0395752868 David Leavitt has earned high praise for his empathetic portrayal of human sexuality and the complexities of intimate relationships. Now, with While England Sleeps, Leavitt moves beyond precisely controlled domestic drama to create a historical novel, one that has greater breadth and resonance than anything he has written before. […]

The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer

David Leavitt W. W. Norton, 2005 ISBN: 0393052362 To solve one of the great mathematical problems of his day, Alan Turing proposed an imaginary programmable calculating machine. But the idea of actually producing a “Turing machine” did not crystallize until he and his brilliant Bletchley Park colleagues built devices to crack the Nazis’ Enigma code, […]

Angina Days: Selected Poems

Günther Eich; Michael Hofmann, trans. Princeton University Press, 2010 ISBN: 9780691144979 This is the most comprehensive English translation of the work of Günter Eich, one of the most important German poets of the postwar period. The author of the POW poem “Inventory,” one of the most famous lyrics in the German language, Eich was rivaled only […]

Selected Poems

Michael Hofmann Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2009 ISBN: 9780374258825 With five critically acclaimed collections – Nights in the Iron Hotel (1983), Acrimony (1986), K.S. in Lakeland: New and Selected Poems (1990), Corona, Corona(1993), and Approximately Nowhere (1999) – Michael Hofmann has established himself as one of the truly original poetic voices of our time. His poetry, both public and personal, expansive and intimate, looks […]

Every Man Dies Alone

Hans Fallada; Michael Hofmann, trans. Melville House, 2009 ISBN: 9781933633633 This never-before-translated masterpiece – by a heroic best-selling writer who saw his life crumble under the Nazis – is based on a true story. It presents a richly detailed portrait of life in Berlin under the Nazis and tells the sweeping saga of one working-class couple […]

Luck

Gert Hofmann; Michael Hofmann, trans. New Directions Publishing 2002 ISBN: 0811215024 A beautiful, bittersweet, and very funny novel about growing up, Luck is perhaps Gert Hofmann’s finest book, and is now brought into English by his son, the acclaimed translator Michael Hofmann. Luck is the story of a nuclear family: father, mother, daughter, and son. But all is not […]

The Wandering Jews

Joseph Roth; Michael Hofmann, trans. Granta Books, 2001 ISBN: 1862074704 The great novelist Joseph Roth, in the last years of Weimer Germany, set out to explore the Jewish communities scattered across Europe and America. He wrote about them in his characteristically tightly-packed, understated style, and brought back reports of hope, poverty, fear and persecution. He traveled […]

Metamorphosis and Other Stories

Franz Kafka; Michael Hofmann, trans. Penguin Classics, 2008 ISBN-10: 0143105248 ISBN-13: 978-0143105244 For all his fame, Franz Kafka published only a small number of stories in his lifetime. This new translation of those stories, by Michael Hofmann, one of the most respected German-to-English translators at work today, makes Kafka’s best-known works available to a new generation […]

Storm of Steel

Ernst Jünger; Michael Hofmann, trans. Penguin Classics, 2004 ISBN: 0142437905 Ernst Jünger served in the German front line, fighting both the British and the French for most of World War I. Young, tough, patriotic but also disturbingly self-aware, he exulted in the war, which he saw not just as a great national struggle but – more […]