Stücke

Lotte Lenya

20 of Trakl's poems translated by James Wright & Robert Bly

3 of Walser's stories translated by Damion Searls (ht Wandering with Robert Walser)

Bildung Mendelssohn

Carolyn Kelly's article on Herta Müller

"Ernst Weiss ... was a physician and creative writer [who] found a way to integrate the disciplines. The best of his books concern medicine and medical workers .... Weiss was born in 1882 outside Brünn, Austro-Hungary, now Brno, Czech Republic, and grew up in towns throughout Moravia and, later, in Prague and Vienna, where he obtained his medical degree in 1908. After practicing in Berne, Berlin, and Vienna (in the last under Dr. Julius Schnitzler, Arthur’s brother), he contracted tuberculosis, and went to recover on voyages aboard the liner Austria to India and Japan."

Thomas McGonigle recommends works by Heimito von Doderer (and Peter Handke among others): "He is equal of Robert Musil and has the advantage of having completed his great books."

'The Dark Side of the Enlightenment' -- "Romantics, Expressionists and Existentialists have all claimed [Heinrich von Kleist] as an inspiration. Kafka called him a "blood-brother." But Kleist belongs to no literary school and remains, as Thomas Mann observed, in a class uniquely his own. Outside the German-speaking lands, he is all too little read." (ht Dave Lull via Books, Inq.)

Mr. Waggish on Musil and Kant

Dan O'Hara interviews the creators of Hochhaus, a radio adaptation of Ballard's High-Rise

Update (Dec. 29): George Steiner on Thomas Bernhard

A logophilist on Herta Müller's The Passport