European category: 23182 books

The East German playwright Heiner Müller (1929-1995) is one of the most influential European dramatists and theater directors since Brecht. While critical literature on Müller often discusses the politics of his works, analysis tends to stop at the level of the text, neglecting the theatrical events...

The Kalevala is the great Finnish epic, which like the Iliad and the Odyssey, grew out of a rich oral tradition with prehistoric roots. During the first millenium of our era, speakers of Uralic languages (those outside the Indo-European group) who had settled in the Baltic region of Karelia, that...

The work of this “eminent, still-wild spirit of Central Europe” (Publishers Weekly) continues to electrify. In The Blue Tower, language is remade with tenderness and abandon: “Rommel was kissing heaven’s dainty hands and yet / from his airplane above the Sahara my uncle / Rafko Perhauc still...

A quirky, cosmopolitan novel about life and literature by the prize-winning Spanish writer Enrique Vila-Matas, author of Bartleby & Co. The narrator of Montano’s Malady is a writer named Jose who is so obsessed with literature that he finds it impossible to distinguish between real...

For the last three hundred years, fictions of the vampire have fed off anxieties about cultural continuity. Though commonly represented as a parasitic aggressor from without, the vampire is in fact a native of Europe, and its "metamorphoses," to quote Baudelaire, a distorted image of social...

The two haunting, poetic novellas that comprise The Bass Saxophonebrilliantly evoke the comedy and sadness of life under the Nazi and Soviet dictatorships. They are prefaced by a remarkable memoir of Skvorecky's jazz-obsessed youth. Jazz is a symbol of freedom in both these novellas. In Emoke,...

Ronsard is considered one of France's greatest love poets, yet his poetic achievements are not restricted to his verses of love, wine and nature. A true Renaissance figure, his themes ranged from politics, science and philsophy, to the bawdy and risqué. Using Greco-Roman and Italian poetic models,...

Pavlo Tychyna (1891-1967) is arguably the greatest Ukrainian poet of the twentieth century and has been described as a “tillerman’s Orpheus” by Ukrainian poet and literary critic Vasyl Barka. With his innovative poetics, deep spirituality and creative word play, Tychyna deserves a place among...

Explore Adam Mickiewicz, Poland’s National Poet, who was a leading figure of Romanticism, often likened to Byron and Goethe. Born in the Russian-partitioned territories of the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania, Mickiewicz was active in the struggle to win independence for his homeland. His epic poem...

In this chronicle of the European Thirty Years War and taking place between the years 1624 and 1636, Mother Courage follows the armies back and forth across Europe, selling provisions and liquor from her canteen wagon to whomever she can. One by one she loses her children to the war but will not part...

Rainer Maria Rilke, the most famous (and important) German language poet of the twentieth century - a master to be ranked with Goethe and Heine - wrote the New Poems of 1907 and 1908 in transition from his late-nineteenth-century style. They mark his appearance as a lyrical, metaphysical poet of the...

Henrik Ibsen was a major 19th-century Norwegian playwright, theatre director, and poet. He is often referred to as "the father of prose drama" and is one of the founders of Modernism in the theatre. His major works include Peer Gynt, An Enemy of the People, A Doll's House, Hedda Gabler,...

The first comprehensive study of the women in Ibsen’s life and work, this landmark book provides a close reading of actual and fictional women as it re-examines the biographical and critical record. In clear, much praised writing, Templeton traces patterns of gender throughout Ibsen’s plays, from...

Often compared to Byron, Keats, Shelley, and Poe, called Lautreamont's "elder brother" by the Czech Surrealists, Karel Hynek Mácha (1810-36) was the greatest Czech Romantic poet, and arguably the most influential of any poet in the language. May, his epic masterpiece, was published in April...