Heinrich Böll

Leila Vennewitz

Previously published: London: Secker and Warburg, 1970. With new afterword by William T. Vollmann.

The Train Was on Time

Hitler's once great army is broken and demoralized, the end of the war is imminent--but still soldiers are rounded up like criminals and sent to the front, Jews are 'evacuated, ' guns are fired, shells explode. In this novel Boll paints war as a series of idiocies, senseless accidents, and bizarre coincidences related only through death.

And where Were You, Adam?

Kurt Andersen

Nobel Prize winner Heinrich Böll's powerful novel about a woman terrorized by the media In an era in which journalists will stop at nothing to break a story, Henrich Böll's The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum has taken on heightened relevance. A young woman's association with a hunted man makes her the target of a journalist determined to grab headlines by portraying her as an evil woman. As the attacks on her escalate and she becomes the victim of anonymous threats, Katharina sees only one way out of her nightmare. Turning the mystery genre on its head, the novel begins with the confession of a crime, drawing the reader into a web of sensationalism, character assassination, and the unavoidable eruption of violence.

The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, Or, How Violence Develops and where it Can Lead

Jurek Becker

Acclaimed as the most remarkable novel of the Holocaust ever written in Germany, Jacob the Liar breaks with the genre's tradition of unremitting realism to offer a suspenseful and masterfully crafted tale of hope, desire, and the life-giving force of fiction. In the ghetto, the possession of a radio is punishable by death. Like thousands of his fellow prisoners, Jacob Heym is cut off from all news of the war - until he is arrested one evening and brought to the German military office, where he overhears a broadcast report of the Red Army's advance to a city some 300 miles away. Miraculously, he is allowed to return to his quarters, but when he tries to spread the good news, he discovers the only way to make people believe him is to tell a lie: "How do I know? I have a radio!" Inevitably, one lie leads to another, and before long Jacob finds himself feeding the entire ghetto fabricated reports of the Russians' advance - reports that save lives when, under the shock of renewed hope, suicides cease and the people of the ghetto take heart. Jacob is a hero and a liar. But how long can his web of lies hold? Here for the first time is Leila Vennewitz's authorized translation of this classic novel, which won the Heinrich Mann Prize for fiction and Switzerland's Charles Veillon Award.

Leila Vennewitz

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