Full AspenCat Catalog

"A grand hotel in the center of 1920s Berlin serves as a microcosm of the modern world in Vicki Baum's celebrated novel, a Weimar-era bestseller that retains all its verve and luster today. Among the guests of the hotel is Dr. Otternschlag, a World War I veteran whose face has been sliced in half by a shell. Day after day he emerges to read the paper in the lobby, discreetly inquiring at the desk if the letter he's been awaiting for years has arrived....

Post-WWII, Germany. Michael Berg is a teenager who becomes ill and is helped home by Hanna, a stranger twice his age. Michael recovers from scarlet fever and seeks out Hanna to thank her. The two are quickly drawn into a passionate but secretive affair. Michael discovers that Hanna loves being read to and their physical relationship deepens. Hanna is enthralled as Michael reads to her from different works of literature. Despite their intense bond,...

A young man, blessed with loving parents and a safe home in a world where want and neglect abound, leaves his family in search of himself. He joins the Samanas, a band of wandering ascetics without possessions or earthly ties. His quest unfulfilled, he descends into a life of unbounded luxury and indulgence. Where is truth? Where will his soul find true ease, in denial, in decadence, or in some truth far greater than himself, so simple, so close to...

The autobiography of thirty-year-old Oskar Matzerath who has lived through the long Nazi nightmare and who, as the novel begins, is being held in a mental institution. Willfully stunting his growth at three feet for many years, wielding his tin drum and piercing scream as anarchistic weapons, he provides a profound yet hilarious perspective on both German history and the human condition in the modern world.

Written while Hans Keilson was in hiding during World War II, The Death of the Adversary is the self-portrait of a young man helplessly fascinated by an unnamed "adversary" whom he watches rise to power in 1930s Germany. It is a tale of horror, not only in its evocation of Hitler's gathering menace but also in its hero's desperate attempt to discover logic where none exists. A psychological fable as wry and haunting as Badenheim 1939, The Death of...

Shares the struggle of Jacques Austerlitz to uncover his identity as he follows the memory of his childhood back to the heart of war-torn Europe, to the place from which he emigrated as a young orphan in 1939.

"It's 1837, and immigrating to a small New Zealand fishing village is an opportunity for Ida Lange's family to build a better future. Yet for Ida, raised in a strict, religious, tight-knit German community, so much is still forbidden to a woman. Yearning for the poor day laborer she shared books with as a child, Ida is now trapped in a dire marriage to a man of her father's choosing. For Cat, who came of age in New Zealand under brutal conditions,...

Johanna, the oldest of the three Steinmann sisters, has successfully managed the family glassblowing business since her father's death, and her sister Marie's artistic gifts have made their wares unexpectedly famous. But now the livelihood of the town of Lauscha, Germany--known around the world as the "paradise of glass"--is in danger. The local glassworks is about to be sold, and rumor has it the buyer wants to make changes that will challenge glassblowing...

"Hailed as a remarkable literary discovery, a lost novel of heart-stopping intensity and harrowing absurdity about flight and persecution in 1930s Germany"--