A masterful new novel from the winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize, hailed for depicting the "landscape of the dispossessed" with "the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose" (Nobel Prize Committee) It was an icy morning in January 1945 when the patrol came for seventeen-year-old Leo Auberg to deport him to a camp in the Soviet Union. Leo would spend the next five years in a coke processing plant, shoveling coal, lugging bricks, mixing mortar, and battling the relentless calculus of hunger that governed the labor colony: one shovel load of coal is worth one gram of bread. In her new novel, Nobel laureate Herta Müller calls upon her unique combination of poetic intensity and dispassionate precision to conjure the distorted world of the labor camp in all its physical and moral absurdity. She has given Leo the language to express the inexpressible, as hunger sharpens his senses into an acuity that is both hallucinatory and profound. In scene after disorienting scene, the most ordinary objects accrue tender poignancy as they acquire new purpose—a gramophone box serves as a suitcase, a handkerchief becomes a talisman, an enormous piece of casing pipe functions as a lovers' trysting place. The heart is reduced to a pump, the breath mechanized to the rhythm of a swinging shovel, and coal, sand, and snow have a will of their own. Hunger becomes an insatiable angel who haunts the camp, but also a bare-knuckled sparring partner, delivering blows that keep Leo feeling the rawest connection to life. Müller has distilled Leo's struggle into words of breathtaking intensity that take us on a journey far beyond the Gulag and into the depths of one man's soul.

From the winner of the IMPAC Award and the Nobel Prize, a fierce novel about a young Romanian woman's discovery of betrayal in the most intimate reaches of her life. "I've been summoned. Thursday, ten sharp." Thus begins one day in the life of a young clothing-factory worker during Ceaucescu's totalitarian regime. She has been questioned before; this time, she believes, will be worse. Her crime? Sewing notes into the linings of men's suits bound for Italy. "Marry me," the notes say, with her name and address. Anything to get out of the country. As she rides the tram to her interrogation, her thoughts stray to her friend Lilli, shot trying to flee to Hungary, to her grandparents, deported after her first husband informed on them, to Major Albu, her interrogator, who begins each session with a wet kiss on her fingers, and to Paul, her lover, her one source of trust, despite his constant drunkenness. In her distraction, she misses her stop to find herself on an unfamiliar street. And what she discovers there makes her fear of the appointment pale by comparison. Herta Müller pitilessly renders the humiliating terrors of a crushing regime. Bone-spare and intense, The Appointment confirms her standing as one of Europe's greatest writers.

A collection of stories on life in Romania under Communism, illustrating the violence and the corruption. They are based on the writer's experience in her youth, in a village in the German-speaking part of the country.

A beautiful, haunting novel by the winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize for Literature

The protagonist of Herta Muller's Traveling on One Leg is Irene, a fragile woman born to a German family in Romania, who has recently emigrated from Romania to Germany. The novel focuses on Irene's relationship with three men: Franz, whom she met in Romania and who was unwilling to respond to her love for him; Stefan, a friend of Franz's; and Thomas, a bisexual bookseller in perpetual crisis. Despite being born to a German family, Irene's place in Germany is as a recent emigre and an unassimilated Romanian German. She feels neither longing for Romania nor any comfort in her newly adopted Germany. Politically and socially isolated, Irene moves within the emotional orbit of these three men, while at the same time moving between West Berlin, Marburg, and Frankfurt, taking a dissonant journey within strange yet familiar territory. Characterized by the same sense of profound isolation found in Muller's The Land of Green Plums (see page 20), Traveling on One Leg is a poignant exploration of exile, homeland, and identity.

From the winner of the Nobel Prize hailed as the laureate of life under totalitarianism, a haunting early novel of surveillance and paranoia Romania—the last months of the Ceausescu regime. Adina is a young schoolteacher. Paul is a musician. Clara works in a wire factory. Pavel is Clara’s lover. But one of them works for the secret police and is reporting on the rest of the group. One day Adina returns home to discover that her fox fur rug has had its tail cut off. On another occasion it’s the hindleg. Then a foreleg. The mutilated fur is a sign that she is being tracked by the secret police—the fox was ever the hunter. Images of photographic precision combine into a kaleidoscope of terror as Adina and her friends struggle to keep mind and body intact in a world pervaded by complicity and permeated with fear, where it’s hard to tell victim from perpetrator. And once again, Herta Müller uses language that displays the “concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose”—as the Swedish Academy noted upon awarding her the Nobel Prize—to create a hauntingly cinematic portrayal of the corruption of the soul under totalitarianism.

The lives of a group of Romanian students under Communism, with its poverty, regimentation and depressing greyness. Life gets no better after graduation, so much so that several commit suicide.

What is "European Angst"? Is it the extension of "German Angst" to a whole continent? The latter term is often used disparagingly to describe the German tendency to problematise, weigh up and hesitate, especially when reasons for this seem slight and insignificant. But European Angst has nothing to do with stereotypical overscrupulousness. It is a mass of powerful emotions which transcend national borders and therefore seemed a fitting title for a conference which was to address disturbing developments, including populism, extremism and Euroscepticism. /// Was ist das: European Angst? Etwa die Ausweitung der German Angst auf einen ganzen Kontinent? Mit German Angst beschreibt man im Ausland oft abschätzig das Problematisieren, Abwägen und Zögern der Deutschen, besonders dann, wenn die Gründe dafür nichtig und klein erscheinen. European Angst aber hat nichts mit stereotyper Bedenkenträgerei zu tun. Sie ist vielmehr ein Bündel starker Emotionen über viele Ländergrenzen hinweg und war deshalb ein treffender Titel für eine Konferenz, auf der über beunruhigende Entwicklungen, über Populismus, Extremismus und Europaskepsis gesprochen werden sollte.

To create the poems in this collection, Nobel Prize-winner Herta M ller cut up countless newspapers and magazines in search of striking phrases, words, or even fragments of words, which she then arranged in a the form of a collage. Father's on the Phone with the Flies presents seventy-three of M ller's collage poems for the first time in English translation, alongside full-color reproductions of the originals. M ller takes full advantage of the collage form, generating poems rich in wordplay, ambiguity, and startling, surreal metaphors--the disruption and dislocation at their core rendered visible through stark contrasts in color, font, and type size. Liberating words from conformity and coercion, M ller renders them fresh and invests them forcefully with personal experience. Sure to thrill any fan of contemporary literature, Father's on the Phone with the Flies is an unexpected, exciting work from one of the most protean writers ever to win the Nobel.