Wolfgang Koeppen is the most important German novelist of the past seventy years: a radical, not to say terrifying, stylist; a caustic, jet-black comedian; a bitter prophet. His late, autobiographical work--the short, intense autofiction, Youth, translated here for the first time--is a portrait of the little north German town of Greifswald before World War I, and is a miracle of compression: this is not historical fiction, but a kind of personal apocalypse. Also included here, in Michael Hofmann's brilliant translation, is one of Koeppen's very last works: a short, fragmentary text spoken over a 1990 German television program depicting his return visit to the town of his schooldays.

About the Author
Wolfgang Koeppen's (1906-1996) The Hothouse was named one of the Los Angeles Times Best Books of the Year and a New York Times Notable Book. Michael Hofmann is a poet and frequent contributor to "The New York Times Book Review", and is widely regarded as one of the world's foremost translators of works from German to English. He lives in London.

Reviews
It is hard to think of a German writer of his generation who has written more sensitively or more profoundly about the Holocaust and its effects than Wolfgang Koeppen. -- Ruth Franklin, New Republic This dazzlingly oblique late work explains and elaborates one man's personal odyssey and also that of a society inching towards atrocity. -- Eileen Battersby The Irish Times The whorl of [Wolfgang] Koeppen's fragments is always steeled by his precision and capacity for revelation, and each word in [Michael] Hofmann's translation feels fixed in place as though it were a mortared brick. This final work from this German master is a brackish jewel. -- Scott Esposito Times Literary Supplement



Book Information
ISBN 9781628970500
Author Wolfgang Koeppen
Format Paperback
Page Count 140
Imprint Dalkey Archive Press
Publisher Dalkey Archive Press
Weight(grams) 182g
Dimensions(mm) 215mm * 148mm * 10mm