Forthcoming Titles

Translations

Modern Austrian Prose. Interpretations and Insights. Volume II

Edited and Introduced by Paul F. Dvorak

Volume II continues the process of introducing readers to significant works of modern Austrian prose within the broader field of German-language literature. Written in English with German reference material appended in order to appeal to the widest possible audience, the articles collected here cover major works by eighteen contemporary writers. Counted among the well-established authors who could not be included in the first volume are such notable writers as Norbert Gstrein, Julian Schutting, Elisabeth Reichart, Erich Hackl, Barbara Frischmuth, Gert Jonke, and Alois Brandstetter. This group is complemented by a cohort of more recent authors who have established themselves within Austria and beyond within the last twenty years. They include Doron Rabinovici, Lilian Faschinger, Gloria Kaiser, Anna Mitgutsch, Paulus Hochgatterer, Marlene Streeruwitz, Evelyn Schlag, Kathrin Röggla, Thomas Glavinic, Dimitre Dinev, and Daniel Kehlmann. All of these authors are linked by language, history, and culture that ties them to a distinctly “Austrian” perspective. Reflecting the strong presence of the female voice within contemporary Austrian letters, almost half of the authors represented are female.  

Contributors to the volume are highly respected scholars within the fields of Austrian and German studies both in the United States and abroad. Almost all of the works discussed are presently available in English translation with several translations presently underway. In sum, the authors, works, and contributors’ commentary on them reflect the richness and diversity of the Austrian tradition. 

PAUL F. DVORAK is Professor of German at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. He has lived and studied extensively in Austria and devotes the majority of his research and scholarship to Austrian studies. He has written about and translated such authors as Arthur Schnitzler, Franz Kafka, Peter Henisch, Robert Schneider, Alfred Kolleritsch, and Alois Brandstetter.

2008
ISBN 978-1-57241-161-6

Felix Salten: Man of Many Faces

By Beverley Driver Eddy

Cover Design: Beth A. Steffel

During his lifetime Felix Salten (1869-1945) played a notable role in the cultural life of Vienna as social critic, essayist, playwright, novelist, and screenwriter. He founded the city’s first cabaret, wrote operetta librettos, and penned books about his travels to Palestine and to the United States. He was an authoritative voice on matters of the theater, served as active and honorary President of the Vienna P.E.N.-club, wrote a weekly column for Theodor Herzl’s Zionist newspaper, and was, in the words of his harshest critic Karl Kraus, “the best journalist in Vienna.”

This biographical study firmly positions the multi-faceted Salten within his Vienna context. Wherever possible, Salten speaks for himself in describing events of his own life and aspects of the bustling city around him, from the Habsburg court to the city slums, from the concert hall to the Prater folk’s park. It reexamines his controversial role in the circle of Young Vienna authors, his difficult friendships with Arthur Schnitzler and Richard Beer-Hofmann, his presumed authorship of Josefine Mutzenbacher, and his thoughts on animal communication as presented in works such as Bambi. A final chapter deals with the “Disneyfication” of Salten and the transformations of three of his novels into American family film fare.
 

Beverley Driver Eddy is Professor Emerita of German at Dickinson College, in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.
 

2009
ISBN: 978-1-57241-169-2

The Last Year

By Ilse Tielsch

Translated by: Anne C. Ulmer

Cover Design: Beth A. Steffel

In this gentle and simultaneously amusing, yet ominous, autobiographical novel, Ilse Tielsch describes the events of 1938 on the Austrian-Czech border, as seen through the eyes of a bright-eyed and curious ten-year-old girl. We watch as the divisive vitriol of Hitler’s politics destroys the sense of community that had prevailed between speakers of Czech and German, as the awareness of ethnic differences comes to divide people, and as people mysteriously begin to disappear from the village. Throughout the year, Elfi’s parents are increasingly reluctant to answer questions; though they attempt to keep Elfi ignorant of politics, the reader understands before she does what tragic events are building momentum in this region. Elfi’s narrative gives vivid life to the personal histories that are taking place against the background of larger historical events.

Ilse Tielsch was born in 1929 in the Moravian town of Auspitz/Hustopeče. She fled to Austria in April 1945 and earned a doctorate in journalism and German studies at the University of Vienna. As a free lance writer since 1964, Ilse Tielsch is the author of more than a dozen novels, including Die Ahnenpyramide (1980) (Ancestral Pyramid, 2001) as well as numerous essays and radio plays. Her work has been translated into at least seventeen foreign languages, among them English, French, Dutch, Turkish, Swedish, and Arabic. Numerous prizes and honors have been bestowed upon her, among them the Anton-Wildgans prize and the Austrian Cross of Honor for Science and Art.

Anne Close Ulmer is a professor of German at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. Her areas of specialization are Austrian literature and culture; 20th-century German prose; poetry and drama; European fairy-tale; youth literature, turn-of-the-century Vienna, Rilke and his circle; and German language. Her previous translations include Peter Henisch, Negatives of My Father (Ariadne Press, 1990).2009

2009
ISBN: 978-1-57241-167-8

Between Nine and Nine

By Leo Perutz

Translated by: Edward Larkin and Thomas Ahrens

Cover Design: Beth A. Steffel

In turn-of-the-century Vienna the impoverished, foreign-born Stanislaus Demba, who earns his livelihood as a tutor of children of the professional class, must urgently find two hundred crowns to take his girlfriend to Italy in order to prevent her from going with a well-off law student. In a series of humorous and intricately-connected vignettes, the Czech-born Leo Perutz, himself an immigrant to Vienna, sends the hero cascading through the various social classes of the city in his quest to obtain the needed money even as he tries to conceal a shameful secret. Besides offering a satire of contemporary life in his characterization of the petty bourgeoisie and the upper class – university professors and intellectuals, gallants and flirts, gamblers and high-class thieves – Between Nine and Nine (1918) also sheds light on the forces that conditioned identity in fin-de-siècle Vienna: industrialization, misogyny, anti-Semitism, classism, and xenophobia. Through the modern, indeterminate narrative stance, the novel, originally entitled “Freedom” in its serialized version, ultimately depicts the contingency of self-determination and identity in a complex social milieu. On display are the author’s skills as storyteller and caricaturist, his subtle and satiric humor, his highly refined aesthetic sensibilities, and his insightful social commentary. Readers will find him and this novel delightfully provocative.

Born in Prague in 1882, Leo Perutz, a successful if self-proclaimed “forgotten writer” and an accomplished mathematician, has been hailed as one of Austria’s foremost authors of the twentieth century by such writers as Ian Fleming, Italo Calvino, Graham Greene, Jorge Luis Borges, and Hermann Broch. His historical and fantastic novels, which offer thoughtful examinations of the unsettled identity of Freud’s Vienna, hint of the mysterious, metaphysical, and enigmatic. Forced to emigrate in 1938, Perutz spent his latter years between Israel and Austria. He died in 1957 in Bad Ischl.

2009
ISBN: 978-1-57241-168-5

We Are Doing Fine

By Arno Geiger

Translated by: Maria Poglitsch Bauer

Cover Design: Beth A. Steffel

We read to explore the unknown, but also to recognize ourselves in others. Arno Geiger’s We Are Doing Fine offers both pleasures, and not only to English-speaking readers. The third novel (winner of the German Book Prize 2005) of the 1968- born Austrian writer highlights events in the lives of three generations of a Viennese family as viewed through the eyes of Philipp, who has inherited the villa of his recently deceased grandmother. In 2001, while cleaning – no, gutting – the house and ridding it of most reminders of its former occupants, the grandson is forced to think about his family more than is to his liking.

In a brilliantly spare and precise language, Geiger mixes crucial incidents of Austrian history with both everyday and tragic occurrences in the family’s private lives. His ear for and empathy with the characters, particularly the women in the story, is exceptional. A dysfunctional family emerges and is even more poignant because the specific Austrian background only makes the universal in such families more apparent.

Philipp is following family tradition, when he tries to make clear to his married girlfriend that he neither knows much nor wants to find out more about his family. This is the crux of We Are Doing Fine and the reason why it has more than regional appeal. Austrians have sometimes been accused of having a selective memory, of an aptitude to gloss over uncomfortable truths, and of a penchant for appearances. Geiger’s characters display all of these characteristics to various degrees, but one cannot help but notice that such shortcomings are by now shared by most of society as we know it. Maybe one only can make it through the day when one surfs the surface and when one uses a pat response to all inquiries about one’s general state of being: “We are doing fine.”

2009
ISBN: 978-1-57241-170-8