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	Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - Faust (Part One) The medieval myth of Faust's pact with the devil preoccupied Goethe for most of his working life and in the thirty years during which he worked on Part One he reshaped the legend to dramatize his own very personal concerns as a poet. His version depicts Faust as the greatest scholar of his age, master of every branch of learning - from philosophy and law to medicine and theology - only to recognise that the true secrets of existence remain hidden from mankind. To gain this knowledge, he must sacrifice the very thing that makes him human: his own soul. Reflecting Goethe's preoccupation with the exhilaration and terrors of human creativity, Faust offers an ironic perspective on the constant striving in the Age of Enlightenment to challenge the limits of man's advancement through art and science. Publisher: Penguin ISBN: 0140440127 Published: 1973 Paperback: 208 pages, 129 x 198 mm Price: £6.99


	Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - Faust (Part Two) Rich in allusion and allegory, Faust Part Two explores philosophical themes that obsessed Goethe throughout his life. Publisher: Penguin ISBN: 0140440933 Published: 1973 Paperback: 288 pages, 129 x 198 mm Price: £8.99


	Franz Kafka - The Trial 'Somebody must have laid false information against Josef K., for he was arrested one morning without having done anything wrong.' From this first sentence onwards, Josef K. is on trial for his right to exist in a novel which, more than any other, is infinitely perceptive about the nature of terror. Idris Parry introduces his remarkable translation with an essay in which he points to the autobiographical elements in The Trial, in particular Kafka's broken engagement to Felice Bauer. Publisher: Penguin Classics ISBN: 0141182903 Published: 2000 Paperback: 208 pages Price: £7.99


	Franz Kafka - Metamorphosis This volumes contains Kafka's most famous story, 'Metamorphosis'. Other works included are: - 'Meditation', a collection of his earlier studies - 'The Judgement', written in a single night of frenzied creativity - 'The Stoker', the first chapter of a novel set in America There is also a fascinating occasional piece, 'The Aeroplanes at Brescia', Kafka's eye-witness account of an air display in 1909. Taken together, these stories reveal the breadth of Kafka's literary vision and the extraordinary imaginative depth of his thought. Publisher: Penguin Classics ISBN: 0141182520 Published: 2000 Paperback: 256 pages Price: £7.99


	Gunter Grass - The Tin Drum The publication of The Tin Drum in 1959 launched Günther Grass as an author of international repute. Bitter and impassioned, it delivers a scathing dissection of the years from 1925 to 1955 through the eyes of Oskar Matzerath, the dwarf whose manic beating on the toy of his retarded childhood fantastically counterpoints the accumulating horrors of Germany and Poland under the Nazis. Günther Grass, born in Danzig (Gdansk) in 1927, is one of Germany's most celebrated contemporary writers. He is a creative artist of remarkable versatility: novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, graphic artist. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999. Publisher: Vintage ISBN: 0099483505 Published: 2005 Paperback: 576 pages, 179 x 110 mm Price: £5.99


	Bertolt Brecht - The Threepenny Opera One of Brecht's best loved and most performed plays, and a landmark of modern theatre and literature. Based on John Gay's eighteenth century Beggar's Opera, The Threepenny Opera, first staged in 1928 at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm in Berlin (now the home of the Berliner Ensemble), is a vicious satire on the bourgeois capitalist society of the Weimar Republic, but set in a mock-Victorian Soho. With Kurt Weill's unforgettable music - one of the earliest and most successful attempts to introduce jazz to the theatre, it became a popular hit throughout the western world. 'One of the greatest poets and dramatists of our century' - The Observer, London Publisher: Methuen ISBN: 0413390306 Published: 1979 Paperback Price: £8.99


	Thomas Mann - Death in Venice and Other Stories Thomas Mann's haunting, magnificent tale of art and self-destruction Publisher: Vintage Classics ISBN: 0099428652 Published: 2001 Paperback: 320 pages Price: £6.99


	Thomas Mann - Magic Mountain This is an intellectual drama of the forces which play upon modern man. Its theatre is a sanatorium in the Swiss mountains - a community organized with exclusive reference to ill-health. Publisher: Vintage Classics ISBN: 0749386428 Published: 1996 Paperback: 736 pages Price: £8.99


	Herman Hesse - The Glass Bead Game The title refers to an ultra-aesthetic game which is played by scholars in the kingdom of Castalia around the year 2400. This game involves all branches of knowledge, and spiritual values - especially those of the east. Hesse's longing to find a dynamic fusion of mind with nature is set forth more penetratingly in this book than in any other he wrote. Critics have seen in it a late, definitive stage in his thinking influenced by the tragedy of Europe in the Second World War. Publisher: Vintage ISBN: 009928362X Published: 2000 Paperback: 544 pages Price: £8.99


	Erich Maria Remarque - All Quiet on the Western Front All Quiet on the Western Front is probably the most famous anti-war novel ever written. The story is told by a young 'unknown soldier' in the trenches of Flanders during the First World War. Through his eyes we see all the realities of war: under fire, on patrol, waiting in the trenches, at home on leave, and in hospitals and dressing stations. Although there are vividly described incidents which remain in mind, there is no sense of adventure here, only the feeling of youth betrayed and a deceptively simple indictment of war - of any war - told for a whole generation of victims. Publisher: Vintage ISBN: 0099483475 Published: 2005 Paperback: 224 pages Price: £5.99


	Heinrich Boll - The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum Katharina Blum is pretty, bright, hard-working. After falling in love with a young radical on the run from the police, she is portrayed by the city's leading newspaper as a whore, a communist and an athiest, and becomes the target of anonymous phone calls. Her life ruined by the distortions of a corrupt press, she shoots the offending journalist... Publisher: Vintage Classics ISBN: 0749398981 Published: 1993 Paperback: 144 pages Price: £6.99


	Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm - Selected Tales The tales gathered by the Grimm brothers are at once familiar, fantastic, homely, and frightening. They seem to belong to no time, or to some distant feudal age of fairytale imagining. Grand palaces, humble cottages, and the forest full of menace are their settings; and they are peopled by kings and princesses, witches and robbers, millers and golden birds, stepmothers and talking frogs. A new translation of Grimms' tales offering a more representative selection, including animal fables, tall tales, comic peasant tales, religious magic tales and morality tales. As well as some seventy-nine tales, including all the well-known fairy tales, the edition also prints earlier versions of some of the famous stories, and stories that were removed after the first edition, to show the stylistic evolution of the stories in their retelling by the Grimms. The introduction places the work of the Grimms in the literary and historical context of German Romanticism and demonstrates how the brothers edited, refined and adapted tales which were not necessarily taken from the peasant sources they implied. The edition includes Wilhelm Grimm's preface to the second edition (1819) in which he described their methods of collecting and admitted their intervention, as well as Jacob's Circular Letter with regard to the Collecting of Folk Poesy appealing to other collectors. Notes identify sources and variants,common motifs and linked tales, and any changes introduced by the Grimms. Readership: readers and students of classic fairy tales, German literature, comparative literature, German Romanticism 'a terrific new edition...these 82 tales plunge us back into the puzzling, bizarre and often hideously cruel forests of rural, feudal Germany' - The Independent, UK Translated by Joyce Crick Publisher: Oxford World's Classics ISBN: 0192804790 Published: 2005 Paperback: 404 pages, 196 x 129 mm Price: £8.99


	Two Lives of Charlemagne Einhard's Life of Charlemagne is an absorbing chronicle of one of the most powerful and dynamic of all medieval rulers, written by a close friend and adviser. In elegant prose it describes Charlemagne's personal life, details his achievements in reviving learning and the arts, recounts his military successes, and depicts one of the defining moments in European history: Charlemagne's coronation as emperor in Rome on Christmas Day 800. By contrast, Notker's account, written some decades after Charlemagne's death, is a collection of anecdotes rather than a presentation of historical facts. In these stories, which merge into fiction, Charlemagne is already half way to becoming the legendary figure of later medieval epics. Publisher: Penguin Classics ISBN: 0140442138 Published: 1974 Paperback: 240 pages Price: £8.99


	Wolfram von Eschenbach - Parzival Composed in the early thirteenth century, Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival is the re-creation and completion of the story left unfinished by its initiator Chretien de Troyes. It follows Parzival from his boyhood and career as a knight in the court of King Arthur to his ultimate achievement as King of the Temple of the Grail, which Wolfram describes as a life-giving Stone. As a knight serving the German nobility in the imperial Hohenstauffen period, the author was uniquely placed to describe the zest and colour of his hero's world, with dazzling depictions of courtly luxury, jousting and adventure. Yet this is not simply a tale of chivalry, but an epic quest for spiritual education, as Parzival must conquer his ignorance and pride and learn humility before he can finally win the Holy Grail. Publisher: Penguin ISBN: 0140443614 Published: 1980 Paperback: 448 pages, 129 x 198mm Price: £12.99


	The Nibelungenlied This great German epic poem of murder and revenge recounts the progress of Siegfried's love for the peerless Kriemhild, the wedding of Gunther - her brother - and Brunhild, the quarrel between the two queens, Hagen's treacherous murder of Siegfried, and Kriemhild's eventual triumph. Composed nearly eight hundred years ago by an unnamed poet, the Nibelungenlied is the principal literary expression of those heroic legends of which Richard Wagner made such free use in The Ring. A. T. Hatto's translation transforms an old text into a story as readable and exciting as Homer's Iliad. Publisher: Penguin Classic ISBN: 0140441379 Published: 1973 Paperback: 416 pages Price: £9.99