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The story of the paradoxical relationship of two parents.

As he clears out his parents’ house, Philipp, a photographer, comes across an object that has played a major role in his parents’ lives. Herta and Georg made a fine couple when they first met. Their son imagines the early days of their relationship and remembers how his father was forced to flee across the inner-German border to the West. When Herta and Philipp joined him a few days later, this could have signaled the start of a new era of happiness, but the seeds of their separation had already been sown. In gentle, probing prose, Gert Loschütz describes how Philipp gradually unravels the paradoxical nature of his parents’ relationship: it was love that destroyed their love. To his astonishment, Philipp discovers that Herta and Georg had been in contact all those years in a way they kept secret even from one another.

A collection of unique, profound, and witty stories that relate animals’ peculiarities to human attitudes.

Animals is a collection of short stories in which each story takes a peculiar item about animals that appears, like fables, to shine a spotlight on different aspects of human behavior—like caterpillars digging their own graves, sharks in need of artificial respiration, ducks that keep an eye out for hungry predators even in their sleep. It is a treat to watch Eva Menasse spin these observations into scenes of people battling their everyday anxieties and doubts. An old tyrant realizes that he is unable to prevent his wife’s worsening dementia from erasing his own past as it erases hers. A mother who tries to protect a Muslim child from hostile accusations finds that her own boundaries between good and evil begin to blur. A woman realizes how starkly her father’s traumatic past has shaped her quirky habits and deepest fears. Combining biting wit, mystery, and melancholy, these tales are the work of a masterful storyteller.

A touching and sensitive tale of love and loss that unfolds in a divided Berlin in the 1980s.
 
Against the backdrop of West Berlin in 1987, meet Soja—a skilled typesetter, a refugee from East Germany, and a temporary florist with a generous heart. Her life takes an unexpected turn when she crosses paths with Harry—a tall, free-spirited individual with a quietly determined demeanor, haunted by a complex past and an uncertain future. Their encounter sets in motion a fateful connection that leaves a lasting mark on Soja’s life.
 
The remnants of their story are encapsulated in a school notebook, containing precisely eighty-nine undated entries where Harry chronicled his thoughts during their time together. However, conspicuous by its absence in the narrative is Soja herself. Years later, driven by the need to tell their tale and fill the void left by Harry, she embarks on a poignant journey of remembrance.
 
As Soja revisits the man who both impressed her with determination and disconcerted her with a mysterious gift, she finds herself captivated by his childlike essence. Despite Harry’s troubled history—ten years in prison, probation violations due to discontinued drug therapy, and the looming threat of immediate imprisonment—Soja remains resolute in her passion for him.
 
Katja Lange-Müller, an acclaimed storyteller, skillfully draws readers into the heart of this novel. With sensitivity, humor, and melancholy, she unfolds the narrative of an unhappy love story that transforms into the greatest happiness in life. Along the way, Lange-Müller paints an atmospherically dense portrait of the divided and stagnant Berlin of the 1980s, creating a captivating and emotionally charged reading experience.

Richly imagined and recounted in vivid prose of extraordinary beauty, this book is a stunning illustration of Ransmayr’s talent for imbuing a captivating tale with intense metaphorical, indeed metaphysical force.

The world’s most powerful man, Qiánlóng, emperor of China, invites the famous eighteenth-century clockmaker Alister Cox to his court in Beijing. There, in the heart of the Forbidden City, the Englishman and his assistants are to build machines that mark the passing of time as a child or a condemned man might experience it and that capture the many shades of happiness, suffering, love, and loss that come with that passing.

Mystified by the rituals of a rigidly hierarchical society dominated by an unimaginably wealthy, god-like ruler, Cox musters all his expertise and ingenuity to satisfy the emperor’s desires. Finally, Qiánlóng, also known by the moniker Lord of Time, requests the construction of a clock capable of measuring eternity—a perpetuum mobile. Seizing this chance to realize a long-held dream and honor the memory of his late beloved daughter, yet conscious of the impossibility of his task, Cox sets to work. As the court is suspended in a never-ending summer, festering with evil gossip about the monster these foreigners are creating, the Englishmen wonder if they will ever escape from their gilded cage. More than a meeting of two men, one isolated by power, the other by grief, this is an exploration of mortality and a virtuoso demonstration that storytelling alone can truly conquer time.
 

A unique and modern approach to money, wealth, greed, and financial ignorance presented via a story of a family in the Munich suburbs.

The Federmanns live a pleasant but painfully normal life in the Munich suburbs. All that the three children really know about money is that there’s never enough of it in their family.
 
Every so often, their impish Great-Aunt Fé descends on the city. After repeated cycles of boom and bust, profligacy and poverty, the grand old lady has become enormously wealthy and lives alone in a villa on the shore of Lake Geneva. But what does Great-Aunt Fé want from the Federmanns, her only surviving relatives? This time, she invites the children to tea at her luxury hotel where she spoils, flummoxes, and inspires them. Dismayed at their ignorance of the financial ways of the world, she gives them a crash course in economics that piques their curiosity, unsettles their parents, and throws open a whole new world. The young Federmanns are for once taken seriously and together they try to answer burning questions: Where does money come from? Why are millionaires and billionaires never satisfied? And why are those with the most always showered with more?
 
In this rich volume, the renowned poet, translator, and essayist Hans Magnus Enzensberger turns his gimlet eye on the mechanisms and machinations of banks and politicians—the human greed, envy, and fear that fuels the global economy. A modern, but moral-less fable, Money, Money, Money! is shot through with Enzensberger’s trademark erudition, wit, and humanist desire to cut through jargon and forearm his readers against obscurantism.
 

The English debut of an idiosyncratic narrative voice.

“What now?” wonders Asta, a nurse who has returned to Germany after a final assignment in Nicaragua. After over twenty years working for international aid organizations, her services are no longer needed. No one is waiting for her. She has nowhere to go. Even the language has lost its familiarity. She stands next to a revolving door at Munich airport, observing the other travelers as she smokes one duty-free cigarette after another. Some of these strangers resemble figures from her past, bringing memories of an adventurous life flooding back. Her catalog of tragicomic attempts at assistance in Germany, Nicaragua, India, Mongolia, and Tunisia raises questions about what it takes to help and whom we are really helping. Katja Lange-Müller’s works have been critically acclaimed for their dark humor and affectionate, nuanced portrayals of characters wrestling with knotty situations and relationships. Revolving Door marks a fitting English debut of this most idiosyncratic of narrative voices.

A new translation of one of the earliest volumes of Max Frisch’s innovative notebooks.
 
Throughout his life, the great Swiss playwright and novelist Max Frisch (1911–1991) kept a series of diaries, or sketchbooks, as they came to be known in English. First published in English translation in the 1970s, these sketchbooks played a major role in establishing Frisch as, according to the New York Times, “the most innovative, varied and hard-to-categorize of all major contemporary authors.” His diaries, said the Times, “read like novels and his best novels are written like diaries.”
 
Now Seagull Books presents the first unabridged English translation of Sketchbooks, 1946–1949 in a new translation by Simon Pare. This edition reinstates material omitted from the 1977 edition, including a screenplay for an unmade film. In this first volume, which covers the years 1946 to 1949, Frisch chronicles the intellectual and material situation in postwar Europe from the vantage point of a citizen of a neutral, German-speaking country. His notes on travels to the scarred cities of Germany, to Austria, France, Italy, Prague, Wroclaw, and Warsaw paint a complex and stimulating picture of a continent emerging from the rubble as new fault lines are drawn between East and West. As Frisch completes his final architectural projects and garners early success as a writer, he reflects on theater, language, and writing, and he sketches the outlines of plays, including The Fire Raisers and Count Öderland.
 
Whatever experience he chronicles in the sketchbook—whether it’s a Bastille Day party, an Italian fish market, or a tightrope display amid the ruins of Frankfurt or an afternoon by Lake Zurich with Bertolt Brecht, to take just a few examples—his keen dramatist’s eye immerses the reader in the setting while also probing the deeper significance and motivations underlying the scene. This new translation will serve to draw out the immediacy and contemporary quality of Frisch’s observations from the shadow of his status as a classic author, bringing his work to life for a new audience.

A fresh translation of the second volume of Max Frisch’s diaries.

By the time Swiss author Max Frisch published the second volume of his diaries or sketchbooks, he had achieved international recognition as a writer and dramatist. In this volume, he develops his version of the literary diary as a mosaic of musings on architecture and writing, travelogue, autobiography, and political insight. He considers Cold War tensions as well as the civil rights and anti–Vietnam War movements in the United States. Now middle-aged himself, he looks squarely at men’s evolving attitude to life, love, sex, women, and status. And for all the idyllic descriptions of his new home in Berzona, Frisch becomes increasingly critical of his native Switzerland, in particular the crackdowns on left-wingers and protestors, and receives abuse for his stance. Based on the second German edition that reinstated material that had been removed from the original 1972 version, this fresh and definitive translation brings an important mid-twentieth-century European classic back to life.
 

A suspenseful novel that delves into the complexities of a father-son relationship and the timeless themes of guilt and forgiveness.
 
A longboat plummets over the Great Falls, drowning the five passengers on board. The Lockmaster, the heir to an ancient title and responsible for guiding river traffic safely around this natural barrier on the White River, ought to have prevented this tragedy. His son is convinced that it was not an accident. Is his irascible father a murderer? A hydraulic engineer all too familiar with the brute force of rivers, he sets out to discover the truth and find his missing father.
 
The Lockmaster is a dramatic tale set in a world where water has become a precious commodity and Europe has fractured into warring ethno-nationalist entities desperate to uphold the traditions and insignia of a so-called glorious bygone era. Christoph Ransmayr recounts this story in his trademark style, its epic force shot through with visions of future technology and reactionary politics amid a climate breakdown. At heart, though, this novel is the story of a father–son relationship straddling the fault lines between past and present, and an exploration of timeless questions of guilt and forgiveness.
 

 A history of the countries bordering the Black Sea told through the stories of the people who live there.
 
Fringing the Black Sea is a diverse array of countries, some centuries old and others emerging only after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Jens Mühling travels through this region, telling the stories of the people he meets along the way in order to paint a picture of the mix of cultures found here and to understand the present against a history stretching back to the arrival of Ancient Greek settlers and beyond.

A fluent Russian speaker with a knack for gaining the trust of those he meets, Mühling brings together a cast of characters as diverse as the stories he hears, all of whom are willing to tell him their complex, contradictory, and often fantastical tales full of grief and legend. He meets descendants of the so-called Pontic Greeks, whom Stalin deported to Central Asia and who have now returned; Circassians who fled to Syria a century ago and whose great-great-grandchildren have returned to Abkhazia; and members of ethnic minorities like the Georgian Mingrelians or Bulgarian Muslims, expelled to Turkey in the summer of 1989. Mühling captures the region’s uneasy alliance of tradition and modernity and the diverse humanity of those who live there.
 

The fraught and generative relationship between two postwar literary giants—revealed through a series of letters published for the first time in English.  

Ingeborg Bachmann (1926–1973) stands among the most vital voices of postwar German literature—an acclaimed poet and prose writer who also reshaped radio drama and opera. In 1958, a letter of admiration from the Swiss novelist Max Frisch (1911–1991), written after hearing Bachmann’s radio play The Good God of Manhattan, led to a meeting in Paris and the beginning of an intense, volatile love affair that would forever leave a mark on both their lives and work. Presented here for the first time in English, 299 letters written between 1958 and 1973 trace the arc of that relationship: long separations, the strain of two writers attempting to share a life, creative rivalry, sexual jealousy, and gendered tensions sharpened by a fifteen-year age gap. The correspondence ranges from everyday logistics to raw psychological insight, from passion and longing to bitterness, silence, and regret. The later letters, written as Bachmann’s health declined, expand to include friends, relatives, and key literary figures. First published in German in 2022, this correspondence overturned long-held myths about the two writers, revealing mutual influence, negotiated freedom, and a struggle to reconcile incompatible needs. Intimate and revelatory, these letters illuminate the fragile intersection of love, power, and creativity.