Books by Ralph Manheim

Three stories deal with the breakdown of language, a man's search for his missing wife, and a mother's suicide.

A writer, fearful of losing his abilities and hence his connection with the world, takes an afternoon walk and has several encounters that reaffirm his confidence.

Four essays on the relation of the artist to his culture-and to himself- compose this volume by the analytical psychologist Erich Neumann.

BAAL, which renowned playwright Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) wrote when he was in college, is the provocative story of a drunken, ruthless, womanizing poet and singer, a desperate antihero in the tradition of Villon and Rimbaud. The NEW YORK TIMES called the first American production "strong stuff, both horrible and fascinating".

This comprehensive collection offers Brecht fans a selection from the whole range of his works: early poems influenced by Rimbaud and Villon, austere free verse on urban themes, sonnets, satires, long narrative poems, epigrams, political poems and poems on the theatre. It conveys with surprising success his extraordinary command of different styles and forms, as well as the direction of his personal evolution and interests against a changing background and the greatest political tragedies of our century.

A collection of stories exploring political and social conditions is accompanied by a brief portrait of the life of the distinguished German author.

In an attempt to compensate for his unsightly Adam's apple, Mahlke sets out to become a great athlete.

Presents a fable which uses the ancient Chinese tale of the test of the chalk circle to illuminate the author's vision of an alterable present and the hope of a future golden age.

The authorized translation of the collected plays includes introductions, placing each work in the context of Brecht's total output and the whole range of German literature.

Celebrating the centenary of Bertolt Brecht--one of the great 20th-century innovators in theater, as well as dazzling writer of stories. In COLLECTED STORIES, which includes the prize-winning "The Monster" and the fragmentary memoir "Life Story of the Boxer Samson-Korner", fans will find the same directness, lack of affectation, and wry humor that characterize Brecht's plays.

As an associate of C G Jung for many years, Joland Jacobi is in unique position to provide an interpretation of his work. In this volume, Dr. Jacobi presents a study of three central, interrelated concepts in analytical psychology: the individual complex, the universal archetype, and the dynamic symbol.

Grass's three most acclaimed and famous works of fiction, all of which take as their theme the supremacy of the individual versus the state.

A Grimm fairy tale, gloriously illustrated by Maurice Sendak, about a little girl who is sent to the forest by her mother to escape a war.

No other god of the Greeks is as widely present in the monuments and nature of Greece and Italy, in the sensuous tradition of antiquity, as Dionysos. In myth and image, in visionary experience and ritual representation, the Greeks possessed a complete expression of indestructible life, the essence of Dionysos. In this work, the noted mythologist and historian of religion Carl Kerenyi presents a historical account of the religion of Dionysos from its beginnings in the Minoan culture down to its transition to a cosmic and cosmopolitan religion of late antiquity under the Roman Empire. From the wealth of Greek literary, epigraphic, and monumental traditions, Kerenyi constructs a picture of Dionysian worship, always underlining the constitutive element of myth. Included in this study are the secret cult scenes of the women's mysteries both within and beyond Attica, the mystic sacrificial rite at Delphi, and the great public Dionysian festivals at Athens. The way in which the Athenian people received and assimilated tragedy in its immanent connection with Dionysos is seen as the greatest miracle in all cultural history. Tragedy and New Comedy are seen as high spiritual forms of the Dionysian religion, and the Dionysian element itself is seen as a chapter in the religious history of Europe.

In this vast novel, packed with incident, Gunter Grass traces the dark labyrinth of the German mentality as it developed during the rise, fall, and aftermath of the Third Reich.

The Sanctuary of Eleusis, near Athens, was the center of a religious cult that endured for nearly two thousand years and whose initiates came from all parts of the civilized world. Looking at the tendency to "see visions," C. Kerenyi examines the Mysteries of Eleusis from the standpoint not only of Greek myth but also of human nature. Kerenyi holds that the yearly autumnal "mysteries" were based on the ancient myth of Demeters search for her ravished daughter Persephone--a search that he equates not only with womans quest for completion but also with every person's pursuit of identity. As he explores what the content of the mysteries may have been for those who experienced them, he draws on the study of archaeology, objects of art, and religious history, and suggests rich parallels from other mythologies.

One family's grandchildren recount the eccentricities and foibles of their grandparents, whose lives have remained in the timewarp of World War I "fields of glory". Awarded the prestigious Goncourt Prize, this novel vaulted author Jean Rouaud from anonymity to acclaim as the freshest literary voice in France in decades.

Parallel tales of the struggle between the sexes down the ages run through this story of an immortal talking fish from the Stone Age whose insidious counseling to men led to the overthrow of the matriarchy and the rise of the patriarchy.

Displaying his characteristic penchant for the macabre, the tender and the comic, Michael Tournier presents the traditional Magi describing their personal odysseys to Bethlehem--and audaciously imagines a fourth, "the eternal latecomer"' whose story of hardship and redemption is the most moving and instructive of all. Prince of Mangalore and son of an Indian maharajah, Taor has tasted an exquisite confection, rachat loukoum, and is so taken by the flavor that he sets out to recover the recipe. His quest takes him across Western Asia and finally lands him in Sodom, where he is imprisoned in a salt mine. There, this fourth wise man learns the recipe from a fellow prisoner, and learns of the existence and meaning of Jesus.

This abridged edition makes the Freud/Jung correspondence accessible to a general readership at a time of renewed critical and historical reevaluation of the documentary roots of modern psychoanalysis. This edition reproduces William McGuire's definitive introduction, but does not contain the critical apparatus of the original edition.

Ralph Manheim, the highly acclaimed and prize-winning translator, has rediscovered in the original German editions of the Grimms' works the unadorned, direct rhythm of the oral form in which they were first recorded.

A new and modern translation of the entire collection of folk and fairy tales written by the Brothers Grimm.

In a devastating story of the Holocaust, a fifty-three-year-old minor functionary of the Royal Hungarian Railways, E.S., investigates the reduction of his pension, while the Nazis plot the extermination of the European Jews.

Originally published to shocked reviews in 1932 France, a scathing literary critique of what the writer believed to be the poor judgment and hypocrisy of society follows the travels of petit-bourgeois anti-hero Bardamu, from the trenches of World War I and the African jungle to America and Paris.

In The Jukebox and Other Essays on Storytelling, Peter Handke offers three intimate, eloquent meditations that map a self-reflexive journey from Alaska to the Austria of his childhood, while illuminating the act of writing itself. In his "Essay on Tiredness", Handke transforms an everyday experience - often precipitated by boredom - into a fascinating exploration of the world of slow motion, differentiating degrees of fatigue, the types of weariness, its rejuvenating effects, as well as its erotic, cultural, and political implications. The title essay is Handke's attempt to understand the significance of the jukebox, a quest which leads him, while on a trip in Spain, into the literature of the jukebox, the history of the music box, and memories of the Beatle's music. In turn elucidating various stages of his own life. And in his "Essay on the Successful Day", for which there is no prescription, Handke invents to picture of tranquility, using a self-portrait by Hogarth as his point of departure to describe a state of being at peace. Playful, reflective, insightful, and entertaining, The Jukebox and Other Essays on Storytelling constitutes a literary triptych that redefines the art of the essay and challenges the form of the short story, confirming Peter Handke's stature as "one of the most original and provocative of contemporary writers" (Lawrence Graver, The New York Times Book Review).

Reich urges the common man to acknowledge the emotional plague that dominates reason and marshal human resources for the betterment of mankind.

In this, his final book, Erich Auerbach writes, "My purpose is always to write history." Tracing the transformations of classical Latin rhetoric from late antiquity to the modern era, he explores major concerns raised in his Mimesis: the historical and social contexts in which writings were received, and issues of aesthetics, semantics, stylistics, and sociology that anticipate the concerns of the new historicism. In this, his final book, Erich Auerbach writes, "My purpose is always to write history." Tracing the transformations of classical Latin rhetoric from late antiquity to the modern era, he explores major concerns raised in his Mimesis: the historical and social contexts in which writings were received, and issues of aesthetics, semantics, stylistics, and sociology that anticipate the concerns of the new historicism.

Set in British colonial India, this groundbreaking play shows a man being disassembled and reconstructed into a soldier. Reissue.

Hitler's infamous prison writings of 1923, which later became the blueprint for the Third Reich and Nazism.

Margarete Buber, the journalist daughter of Martin Buber, and Milena Jesenska, the beautiful lover of Kafka, met in Ravensbruck concentration camp in 1940. For four terrible years, the two women formed an extraordinary bond and made a pact that if only one survived, the other would bear witness. Only Margarete lived to remember. This is her story of Milena--of fearless love, sacrifice, and nobility.

Long unavailable in this country, Mr. Puntila and His Man Matti comprises some of the best comedy that Bertolt Brecht wrote for the theater and contains one of his great characters. For his complexity and vitality, Mr. Puntila ranks on a par with Brecht's indelible Galileo and Mother Courage. A hard-drinking landowner, Puntila suffers from a split personality: when drunk, he is friendly and humane; when he sobers up, he is intolerable - ruthless, surly, and self-centered. Oscillating between these two poles, he plays havoc with his workers, his women, his daughter's marriage, and the loyalty of his sardonic chauffeur and valet, Matti. This translation is by John Willett, who with Ralph Manheim is the editor of Brecht's complete dramatic work in English. The joint editors have equipped this volume with a critical introduction and notes, along with Brecht's own notes and variants and the short story on which the play was based.

A pioneer of the idea of a transcendental mythical content present in all societies, Bachofen was deeply concerned with the inner life and how it is expressed in symbolic terms.

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.

THE NIGHT IN LISBON With the world slowly sliding into war, it is crucial that enemies of the Reich flee Europe at once. But so many routes are closed, and so much money is needed. Then one night in Lisbon, as a poor refugee gazes hungrily at the boat enroute to America, a man approaches him with two tickets and a story to tell.It is a harrowing tale of bravery and butchery, daring and death, where the price of love is beyond measure, and the legacy of evil is infinite. And as the young man listens spellbound to the desperate teller, in a matter of hours, the two form a unique and unshakable bond--one that will last all their lives. . . .

North is a vivid chronicle of a desperate man's frantic months of World War II. Accompanied by his wife Lili, their cat Bebert, and an actor friend, our autobiographical narrator Ferdinand leaves Paris for Baden-Baden (a World War II hideaway for wealthy Germans), then is sent to a bombed-out Berlin, and finally leaves in search for gold- gold he stashed in Denmark prior to the war. With the Third Reich in ruins and the Allied armies on Ferdinand's heels, North combines documentary realism with hallucinatory images, capturing the chaos of war and its toll on both victim and victimizer. Ralph Manheim's critically acclaimed translation is followed by a dozen pages of notes on the text.

In On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism, Gershom Scholem guides the reader through the central themes in the intricate history of the Kabbalah, clarifying the relations between mysticism and established religious authority, the mystics' interpretation of the Torah and their attempts to discover the hidden meaning underlying Scripture, the tension between the philosophical and the mystical concepts of God, and the symbolism employed in mystical religion.

The Symbolic Forms has long been considered by many who knew it in the original German as the greatest of Ernst Cassirer's works. Into it he poured all the resources of his vast learning about language and myth, religion, art and science-the various creative symbolizing activities and constructions through which man has expressed himself and given intelligible objective form to his experience.

The third volume of Canetti's memoirs deals with the period of the late 1920s through the mid-1930s when he was living in Vienna and writing "Auto-da-fe" and "Crowds and Power"

Prometheus the god stole fire from heaven and bestowed it on humans. In punishment, Zeus chained him to a rock, where an eagle clawed unceasingly at his liver, until Herakles freed him. For the Greeks, the myth of Prometheus's release reflected a primordial law of existence and the fate of humankind. Carl Kerenyi examines the story of Prometheus and the very process of mythmaking as a reflection of the archetypal function and seeks to discover how this primitive tale was invested with a universal fatality, first in the Greek imagination, and then in the Western tradition of Romantic poetry. Kerenyi traces the evolving myth from Hesiod and Aeschylus, and in its epic treatment by Goethe and Shelley; he moves on to consider the myth from the perspective of Jungian psychology, as the archetype of human daring signifying the transformation of suffering into the mystery of the sacrifice. "A sterling example of classical scholarship, literary exegesis, and cultural inference.... Not only does this book tell us much about man, through his prototypical image, but also much about the Greek civilization which created Prometheus in its image."--Contemporary Psychology

Folk tales tell of clever princesses and peasant girls, six brothers turned into swans, and a boy who learns the language of animals.

A female rat demonstrates that her species will inherit a devastated earth but will inevitably imitate the grotesque example set by human destructiveness throughout history.

Filip Kobal goes searching for his brother and finds much more than he had hoped, including an episode from his own past. The novel takes place in the summer of 1960.

Completed the day before his death in 1961, Rigadoon, the most compassionate of Celine's novels, explores the ravages of war and its aftermath. Often comic and always angry, the first-person autobiographical narrator, with his wife and their cat in tow, takes the reader with him on his flight from Paris to Denmark after finding himself on the losing side of World War II. The train rides that encompass the novel are filled with madness and mercy, as Celine, a physician, aids refugees while ignoring his own medical needs.

A successful artist, Johann Veraguth finds himself torn between his responsibility toward his family, including his estranged wife and beloved young son, his personal fears of the unknown, and his own desperate longing for spiritual fulfillment. Reprint.

Joan of Arc is Joan Dark in SAINT JOAN OF THE STOCKYARDS, Bertolt Brecht's first major political drama for the commercial theater. A virtuous knight in a Christian army of salvation, she makes the stockyards her field of battle when she clashes with Pierpoint Mauler, meat king and philanthropist, over the heart of business and the soul of labor.

Two plays by the great German director include the story of Schweyk, a common German soldier who survives the war through opportunism and wit, and a French Resistance version of Joan of Arc. Reissue.

This is the question posed by the French poet-philosopher Paul Valery in his engaging meditation on the aesthetics of the seashell. As any beachcomber will attest, seashells are an endless source of fascination and delight, and Valery's 1936 essay glows, as Gaston Bachelard says, with his sense of nature's "transcendental geometry". Wondering at the enormous variety of shells -- the helices, the spirals, the surfaces smooth or encrusted with knobs or spines, the bulbs and concavities, the rugged outsides and the satiny surfaces within -- Valery compares the "making" of human beings with that slow, continuous formation that is the "making" of nature.

After years of hiding and surviving near-death in a concentration camp, Ross is finally safe. Now living in New York City among old friends, far from Europe's chilling atrocities, Ross soon meets Natasha, a beautiful model and fellow migre, a warm heart to help him forget his cold memories.Yet even as the war draws to its violent close, Ross cannot find peace. Demons still pursue him. Whether they are ghosts from the past or the guilt of surviving, he does not know. For he is only beginning to understand that freedom is far from easy--and that paradise, however perfect, has a price. . . .

A narratively schizophrenic but psychological piercing novel from acclaimed Austrian author Peter Handke, SHORT LETTER, LONG FAREWELL follows a German man as he wanders through America, hunted by his ex-wife. The surreal plot offers a brilliant depiction of the foreigner's perspective on American culture, and a tragicomic take on the nature of fractured love.

Three novels and a dramatic poem, including THE LONG WAY AROUND (1979), in which an Austrian geologist in Alaska loses his spacial sense; THE LESSON OF SAINTE VICTOIRE (1985), about a writer who can perceive color but not feel anything toward it, a missing sense that gradually returns through his interactions with nature and with other people; and CHILD'S STORY, about a father who learns to love and appreciate his gifted daughter.

After his mother's suicide, Austrian novelist and playwright Peter Handke wanted to set down what he knew, or could say, about her life and the causes of her death before "the dull speechlessness ... the extreme speechlessness" of grief took hold forever. The result is an unsparing, deeply moving elegy in which writing keeps vigil at the limits of language, understanding, and life. This is a haunting memoir of a family tragedy by one of the most acclaimed - and controversial -contemporary writers whose style has been compared to Flaubert, Hemingway, and DeLillo. "Moving and beautifully realized." - The New York Times Book Review

Jakov Lind's first short-story collection, SOUL OF WOOD, was hailed as a unique masterpiece upon its publication in 1962. Combining the psychedelic irreverence of the counter-culture with the coal-black bitterness of Lind's World War II experiences, Lind's stories are a surreal mixture of horrific, absurd, and bleakly comic. With strains of Kafka, Grass, and Vonnegut, these stories are some of the most evocative literary representations of the nature of war, persecution, exile, and human cruelty.

THE THREEPENNY OPERA, originally written in German, tells the story of the dashing highwayman Macheath (a.k.a. Mac the Knife) and his ill-fated romance with Polly Peachum, the daughter of a dealer in stolen goods. The 1954 Broadway production of the play, which starred Lotte Lenya and featured music by Kurt Weill, brought the sounds of jazz and the decadent spirit of Weimar Germany to the American stage.

Three plays deal with bourgeois society, a ruthless, drunken poet, and a working woman who is drawn into Russia's revolutionary movement.

The famous allegorical novel of Germany and the Second World War, first published in 1959. Oskar Matzerath, the hunchbacked narrator, grows up in Danzig during the Nazis' rise to power. Cynical and disgusted by the adults around him, Oskar decides at the age of three to stop growing and observes the world around him with the bitter distance of a freak. Made into a successful movie in 1980, THE TIN DRUM was considered the first significant literary work to come out of postwar Germany.