Product Description: It is 1943. A German submarine commander and an American pilot are stranded on a rubber life raft, floating alone in the middle of the ocean, with nothing between them but a bottle of whiskey, some cigarettes, a few chocolate bars, and a pack of chewing gum...read more

The exiled Iranian writer journeys to visit his mother, from whom he was separated shortly after his birth, and chronicles the mutual disappointment of their reunion and the Islamic dictatorship that influences both their lives.

Product Description: In 1815, Goethe gave symbolic expression to his intense relationship with Marianne Willemer, a recently married woman thirty-five years his junior. He gave her a leaf from the ginkgo tree, explaining that, like its deeply cleft yet still whole leaf, he was "single yet twofold...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Told as a series of parable-like anecdotes, a misanthropic satire by the twentieth-century Austrian playwright presents a modern world of politicians, professionals, tourists, and civil servants reeling from corruption, madness, and alienation. UP. (view table of contents)

Product Description: Goethe's ranging literary genius, nimble yet luminous, resists simple classification. Poet and natural philosopher, critic and raconteur, Goethe was the most commanding literary presence of his time.Goethe and His Publishers organizes for the first time the myriad details of Goethe's career in print...read more

Product Description: For two generations, writers in the German Democratic Republic enjoyed a massive audience in their own country, a readership dependent on their works for a measure of utopian solace amid the grimness of life under Communism. But after the fall of the Berlin Wall, these writers were abandoned by their readers and stripped of the professional structures that had supported them...read more

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Product Description: What makes a city endure and prosper? In this masterful survey of a thousand years of urban architecture, Wolfgang Braunfels identified certain themes common to cities as different as Siena and London, Munich and Venice. Most important is an architecture that expresses the city's personality and most particularly its political personality...read more