Ralph Manheim

Shy, awkward Bastian is amazed to discover that he has become a character in the mysterious book he is reading and that he has an important mission to fulfill.

"Mein Kampf," authored by Adolf Hitler, the renowned leader of the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP), is his autobiographical manifesto. Within its pages, Hitler describes his personal story, political beliefs, and hopes for Germany's future. The work digs into his extremist philosophy, promoting Aryan supremacy and openly anti-Semitic attitudes, leading in one of humanity's darkest periods. Despite its revolting nature, "Mein Kampf"...

"Victor Serge (1890-1947) was born Victor Lvovich Kibalchich to Russian anti-czarist exiles, impoverished intellectuals living "by chance" in Brussels. A precocious anarchist firebrand, young Victor was sentenced to five years in a French penitentiary in 1912. Expelled to Spain in 1917, he participated in an anarcho-syndicalist uprising before leaving to join the Revolution in Russia. Detained for more than a year in a French concentration camp, Serge...

At the beginning of Nobel Prize winner Peter Handke's novel A Moment of True Feeling, Gregor Keuschnig awakens from a nightmare in which he has committed murder, and announces, "From today on, I shall be leading a double life." The duplicity, however, lies only in Keuschnig's mind; his everyday life as the press atache for the Austrian Embassy in Paris continues much as before: routine paperwork, walks in the city, futile intimacies with his family...

Provocative, romantic, and restlessly exploratory, Peter Handke is one of the great writers of our time. Slow Homecoming, originally published in the late 1970s, is central to his achievement and to the powerful influence he has exercised on other writers, chief among them W.G. Sebald. A novel of self-questioning and self-discovery, Slow Homecoming is a singular odyssey, an escape from the distractions of the modern world and the unhappy consciousness,...

Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821) is one of the most illustrated political and military figures of the last two millennia. He has remained in the memory of the world as a legend that the passage of the years has failed to blur. On the contrary, Napoleon Bonaparte widely continues to be considered the personification of human genius. Originally published in this English translation in 1942, leading Russian historian Evgeny Tarle details Napoleon's military...

A nihilistic petit-bougeois named Bardamu opens his medical practice in the slums of suburban Paris.

A collection of essays from Hermann Hesse concerning World War II, his personal anguish and his antagonism to racism, nationalism and war.

A boy is lonely after his dog dies.