Empfehlungen basierend auf "Selected Stories Volume Two: 1995-2009: 1995-2009"

The awarding of the Nobel Prize in Literature to the Canadian writer Alice Munro in 2013 confirmed her position as a master of the short story form. This book explores Munro's work from a full range of critical perspectives, focussing on three of her most popular and important published collections: Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (2001), Runaway (2004), and her final collection Dear Life (2012). With chapters written by the world's leading critics of Munro's work, the short story form and contemporary Canadian writing, this book explores such themes as love and marriage, sex, fate, gender and humor in her writings as well as her approaches to narrative form and autobiography. In these three late collections Munro sharply articulates, again and again, the mysteries of being itself.

Now a New Directions book, the legendary novel that is “equal to the best of Virginia Woolf and Samuel Beckett” (New York Times Book Review) In Malina, originally published in German in 1971, Ingeborg Bachmann invites the reader into a world stretched to the very limits of language. An unnamed narrator, a writer in Vienna, is torn between two men: viewed, through the tilting prism of obsession, she travels further into her own madness, anxiety, and genius. Malina explores love, "deathstyles," the roots of fascism, and passion.

This collection of short stories, some semi-autobiographical, by Marie Luise Kaschnitz (1901-74), the eminent German novelist and poet, reflects many of the themes to be found throughout her fiction, such as the dread of moral anarchy which leaves nothing in its wake, and the shaping of individual destinies by loneliness, insecurity and fear.Usually told from a woman's viewpoint, her works feature strong female characters whose inner strength enables them to overcome their fears and accept their fates with stoic determination. Kaschnitz's chief concern is the human condition, giving her work a continuing relevance; she confronts such universal issues as growing old, growing up and the loss of religious faith as well as those which have a more contemporary resonance, including the social problems of working parents and adoption.

Covering the first half of Nobel Prize winner Alice Munro's career, these are some of the best, most touching and powerful short stories ever writtenThis first-ever selection of Alice Munro's stories sums up her genius. Her territory is the secrets that cackle beneath the façade of everyday lives, the pain and promises, loves and fears of apparently ordinary men and women whom she renders extraordinary and unforgettable.This volume brings together the best of Munro's stories, from 1968 through to 1994. The second selected volume of her stories, 1995-2009 is also published by Vintage Classics.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From Nobel Prize–winning author Alice Munro come nine short stories with “the intimacy of a family photo album and the organic feel of real life” (The New York Times)“In Munro’s hands, as in Chekhov’s, a short story is more than big enough to hold the world—and to astonish us, again and again.”—Chicago TribuneFINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD • A TIME BEST BOOK OF THE YEARIn the nine breathtaking stories that make up this collection, Alice Munro creates narratives that loop and swerve like memory, conjuring up characters as thorny and contradictory as people we know ourselves.The fate of a strong-minded housekeeper with a “frizz of reddish hair,” just entering the dangerous country of old-maidhood, is unintentionally (and deliciously) reversed by a teenaged girl’s practical joke. A college student visiting her aunt for the first time and recognizing the family furniture stumbles on a long-hidden secret and its meaning in her own life. An inveterate philanderer finds the tables turned when he puts his wife into an old-age home. A young cancer patient stunned by good news discovers a perfect bridge to her suddenly regained future. A woman recollecting an afternoon’s wild lovemaking with a stranger realizes how the memory of that encounter has both changed for her and sustained her through a lifetime.Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage is Munro at her best—tirelessly observant, serenely free of illusion, deeply and gloriously humane.

In these stories lives come into focus through single events or sudden memories which bring the past bubbling to the surface. The past, as Alice Munro's characters discover, is made up not only of what is remembered, but also what isn't. The past is there, just out of the picture, but if memories haven't been savoured, recalled in the mind and boxed away, it's as if they have never been - until a moment when the pieces of the jigsaw re-form suddenly, sometimes pleasurably but more often painfully. Women look back at their young selves, at first marriages made when they were naive and trusting, at husbands and their difficult, demanding little ways.There is in this new collection an underlying heartbreak, a sense of regret in her characters for what might have been, for a fork in the road not taken, a memory suppressed in an act of prudent emotional housekeeping. But at the same time there is hope, there are second chances - here are people who reinvent themselves, seize life by the throat, who have moved on and can dare to conjure up the hidden memories, daring to go beyond what is remembered.

A casual introduction, a challenge to a simple game of chess, a lovers' reunion, a meaningless infidelity: from such small seeds Zweig brings forth five startlingly tense tales--meditations on the fragility of love, the limits of obsession, the combustibility of secrets and betrayal. To read anything by Zweig is to risk addiction; in this collection the power of his writing--which, with its unabashed intensity and narrative drive, made him one of the bestselling and most acclaimed authors in the world--is clear and irresistible. Each of these stories is a bolt of experience, unforgettable and unique. Five of Stefan Zweig's most powerful novellas, containing some of his most famous and best-loved work:    • Burning Secret    • A Chess Story     • Fear    • Confusion    • Journey into the Past (Stand alone paperback editions of individual novellas from Pushkin and New York Review of Books will remain in print.)

Wes Anderson on Stefan Zweig: "I had never heard of Zweig...when I just more or less by chance bought a copy of Beware of Pity. I loved this first book. I also read the The Post-Office Girl. The Grand Budapest Hotel has elements that were sort of stolen from both these books. Two characters in our story are vaguely meant to represent Zweig himself — our “Author” character, played by Tom Wilkinson, and the theoretically fictionalised version of himself, played by Jude Law. But, in fact, M. Gustave, the main character who is played by Ralph Fiennes, is modelled significantly on Zweig as well."The post-office girl is Christine, who looks after her ailing mother and toils in a provincial Austrian post office in the years just after the Great War. One afternoon, as she is dozing among the official forms and stamps, a telegraph arrives addressed to her. It is from her rich aunt, who lives in America and writes requesting that Christine join her and her husband in a Swiss Alpine resort. After a dizzying train ride, Christine finds herself at the top of the world, enjoying a life of privilege that she had never imagined.But Christine’s aunt drops her as abruptly as she picked her up, and soon the young woman is back at the provincial post office, consumed with disappointment and bitterness. Then she meets Ferdinand, a wounded but eloquent war veteran who is able to give voice to the disaffection of his generation. Christine’s and Ferdinand’s lives spiral downward, before Ferdinand comes up with a plan which will be either their salvation or their doom.Never before published in English, this extraordinary book is an unexpected and haunting foray into noir fiction by one of the masters of the psychological novel.

These unfinished novels were intended to follow her widely acclaimed Malina in a Proustian cycle to be entitled Todesarten, or Ways of Dying. Through the tales of two women in postwar Austria, Bachmann explores the ways of dying inflicted on women by men, and upon the living by history, politics, religion, family, and the self.

The true story of a woman's incredible journey into the heart of the Third Reich to find the man she loves. When the Gestapo seize 20-year-old Olga Czepf's fiance she is determined to find him and sets off on an extraordinary 2,000-mile search across Nazi-occupied Europe risking betrayal, arrest and death. As the Second World War heads towards its bloody climax, she refuses to give up - even when her mission leads her to the gates of Dachau and Buchenwald concentration camps...Now 88 and living in London, Olga tells with remarkable clarity of the courage and determination that drove her across war-torn Europe, to find the man she loved. The greatest untold true love story of World War Two.