Nobel Prize winner Peter Handke's first full-length drama, hailed in Europe as the play of the decade and compared in importance to Waiting for Godot

Kaspar is the story of an autistic adolescent who finds himself at a complete existential loss on the stage, with but a single sentence to call his own. Drilled by prompters who use terrifyingly funny logical and alogical language-sequences, Kaspar learns to speak normally and eventually becomes creative--doing his own thing with words; for this he is destroyed.

In Offending the Audience and Self-Accusation, one-character speak-ins, Handke further explores the relationship between public performance and personal identity, forcing us to reconsider our sense of who we are and what we know.

The best-known work of the Enlightenment literary giant Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust took a lifetime to write. For more than sixty years, Goethe worked on his masterpiece and ultimately divided it into two parts, the second of which was published in 1832, the year of his death. Hailed as Germany's greatest contribution to world literature, Faust drew upon the legends surrounding a sixteenth-century sorcerer as well as Marlowe's Dr. Faustus. But Goethe's epic interpretation further explores the tension between learning and experience, and in this version Faust sells his soul not simply for magic powers but also for a heightened sense of existence.
Part One of the dramatic poem concerns the magician's devilish pact with Mephistopheles and his seduction of Gretchen, an innocent girl. Part Two incorporates a vast array of influences -- theological, mythological, philosophical, political, musical, and literary--to relate Faust's life at court, his romance with Helen of Troy, and his salvation. This edition features the acclaimed translation by Bayard Taylor.

NOW THE SUBJECT OF A MAJOR STAGE PRODUCTION FEATURING THE TIGER LILLIES WORLD PREMIERE IN EDINBURGH'S LEITH THEATRE ON 11-11-2018.

Intended 'for a theatre on Mars', with a cast of nearly 500 and running to over 200 scenes, Karl Kraus's apocalyptic tragedy 'The Last Days of Mankind' is the longest play ever written. It is also a bitingly satirical commentary on the outbreak and subsequent horrors of World War I. Kraus (1874-1936) ranks as one of the greatest twentieth-century satirists. In 1899 he established his own journal, 'Die Fackel' (The Torch), to 'drain the marsh of empty phrase-making.' His work comprises essays, short stories, poetry and aphorisms, and culminated in the five-act play presented here.

First published in 1920, 'The Last Days' employs a collage of modernist techniques to evoke a despairing and darkly comical vision of the Great War from the perspective of the author's hometown, Vienna. At its centre, Kraus places a cabal of war-mongering press barons and self-serving hacks, whose strategies of mass manipulation he holds responsible for the very atrocities they report.

With this translation of the play in its entirety, Patrick Healy completes the work begun in 2014 when he published the first ever English-language version of the Prologue and Act I in 'In These Great Times', a selected anthology of Kraus' work. The present edition features an introduction and a glossary of relevant names and terms.

About the translator: Patrick Healy is a philosopher, writer and senior lecturer at the Technical University Delft. He lives in Amsterdam. His earlier translations include Karl Kraus, 'In These Great Times: Selected Writings' and Carl Einstein's 'Bebuquin' and 'Negro Sculpture'. In the spring of 2016 his translation of Max Raphael's early critical writings appeared as 'The Invention of Expressionism'. For more information, visit www.patrick-healy.com

Considered by many as Johann Goethe's magnum opus, Faust has a peculiar history of composition and publication. What began as a project in Goethe's youth, at the age of twenty, in 1769, Faust would not fully be completed until 1831 very near the end of the author's life. Based on the German legend of Johann Georg Faust, a magician of the German Renaissance who reportedly gained his mystical powers by selling his immortal soul to the devil, the Faustian legend has forever come to symbolize the inherent peril in dealing with unscrupulous characters and supernatural forces. Presented here in this volume is the first part of Faust, which begins with a prologue in heaven in which we find god challenging the devil that he cannot lead astray one of his favorite scholars, Dr. Faust. The devil, known in the play as Mephistopheles, accepts the challenge and so begins the struggle of Faust between the allure of supernatural power and the fate of his soul. Despite numerous adaptations, Goethe's Faust stands out as arguably the most famous version of this legend. Only Christopher Marlowe's Dr. Faustus can be claimed to rival it for that position. This edition is printed on premium acid-free paper, is translated by Anna Swanwick, and includes an introduction by F. H. Hedge.

Eldorado: Anton's got it made: dream house, artistic wife, baby on the way. And, as the smoke rises from another city saved by coalition bombs, there's a fortune to be made rebuilding the wreckage. So what's he doing forging his boss's signature? And why has his wife crushed her hands under the piano lid? Painfully funny scenes of married bliss in meltdown and the insistent presence, on their screens and in their dreams, of the West's far-flung and half-forgotten wars - Eldorado asks what happens when the drive for success carries us past our coping point.

Perplexed: Taking inspiration from Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author, as well as the pens of Stoppard, Nietzsche and Beckett, influential writer Marius von Mayenburg has created a fast-paced and very funny piece of contemporary absurdism. The four actors play musical chairs with their characters in an astonishing tumble of scenes. Their characters are patchwork individuals, groping for assurance and security in a constantly disintegrating reality, while slipping on the metaphysical banana peels von Mayenburg throws in their path. A comedy about the capriciousness of reality, one's own identity, and the theatre itself.

The Dog, The Night and the Knife: A nightmarish flight through a city, in which all men and women have striking similarities: policeman and doctor, criminal and lawyer, patient and nurse. And all of them are after M. Just as the night seems done, and dawn is coming, M faces the irrevocable choice between dangerous love with a zombie, and the lonely hunt with a dog.

The original tale of moral destruction, in a brand-new translation: Faust is a man torn between the urges of the living world and the significance of moral living. He feels nothing, he lives for nothing, and thus engages in a wager with Mephistopheles, the devil himself. Goethe's master work shares the deep complexity of a human life, rife with pain, mistakes and dynamic complexity.

With Faust, the lushly lyrical and philosophically brilliant drama on which the poet spent almost his entire life, Goethe solidified himself as a major literary figure whose work would transcend time and space to create the modern world. Now, this brand-new, dynamic translation demands we ask of our world: who will win, humanity or Mephistopheles?

A new play from Nobel Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek that deals with the 2015 terror attack on the satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo's offices in Paris.

In Greek mythology, it is Hera who blinds the hero Heracles, so that, in a fit of fury, he kills his own family. In the twenty-first century, the gods have another name. So did the three young men who stormed a magazine's editorial office and a Jewish supermarket in Paris in January 2015 and murdered twelve people. The blind fury, however, remained and more virulent than ever, not least because the weapons were so much more effective.

In this raging text, arguably one of her darkest, Nobel Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek investigates topical political events in the context of enduring history and myths. Fury expresses itself not only multi-voiced and from the changing perspective of Islamist terrorists (and their special hatred of Jews), in the shape of furious German citizens, individual narcissistic humiliation, or brutal distribution battles around the globe. Rather, fury also appears as the motor that has driven people with a devastating force for centuries.

With her characteristic linguistic power, Jelinek articulates her own disconcertedness in the face of these crimes. In passing, she returns repeatedly to the contradiction between religious laws against representation and the deluge of images online, where movies of assassination, severed heads, and other atrocities are exhibited for millions to see. Fury is a compact grand epic that starts in primal times and attempts to describe the indescribable, relating the inexplicable in our times.

The Brecht Yearbook, published by Camden House on behalf of the International Brecht Society, is the central scholarly forum for the study of Brecht's life and work and of topics relevant to him.

Volume 49 features the proceedings of the 17th IBS Symposium, which took place at the universities of Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Jerusalem in December 2022 under the motto Bertolt Brecht in Dark Times: Racism, Political Oppression, and Dictatorship. It contains three thematic sections: Brecht's Work in Israeli and Palestinian Contexts, Brecht and Becoming, Futurity, and Thanatopolitics, and (Anti-) Heroism and Resistance in Dark Times. The contributions discuss artists and theater companies who have engaged with Brecht's work or can be associated with it under these thematic aspects, including David Avidan, the Habima National Theater, Jindřich Honzl, the Jenin Freedom Theater, Ghassan Kanafani, Tetsuo Kogawa, Yosef Milo, Omri Nitzan, Manuel Chaves Nogales, the Ohel Theater, the Prague Liberated Theater, Samìh al-Qāsim, Johan Taub, Jiři Voskovec, Günther Weisenborn, Jan Werich, and Arnold Zweig.

Contributors are Fanti Baum, Micha Braun, Bettina Christner, Manuel Clancett, Amir Farjoun, Leon Gabriel, Torben Ibs, Gad Kaynar-Kissinger, Ferdinand Klüsener, Jan Kühne, Joachim Lucchesi, Nikolaus Müller-Schöll, Riki Ophir, Avraham Oz, Rebecca Rovit, Julia Schade, and Florian Va en. Book Reviews edited by Lydia J. White. Reviewers: Stephen Brockmann, Ann M. Fox, Hasibe Kalkan, Sabine Kebir, Yu Wei Jie, and Gregor Schwering.

A morality masterpiece, The Caucasian Chalk Circle powerfully demonstrates Brecht's pioneering theatrical techniques. This version by Frank McGuinness was published to coincide with the National Theatre's production which toured the UK in 2007.

A servant girl sacrifices everything to protect a child abandoned in the heat of civil war. Order restored, she is made to confront the boy's biological mother in a legal contest over who deserves to keep him. The comical judge calls on an ancient tradition - the chalk circle - to resolve the dispute. Who wins?

This version by Frank McGuinness was first presented by the National Theatre in 1997 and revived in 2007, opening at the Gulbenkian Theatre, Canterbury, on 8 January.

An Edinburgh International Festival production.

The lobby of a grand hotel, New Year's Eve. A snow storm rages. Minetti, a long-forgotten actor, arrives in great spirits to discuss his comeback as King Lear with a theatre director.

While he waits patiently in the hotel lobby, Minetti's obsessive personality reveals itself in a series of strange encounters with other guests. He rails against outrageous fortune and unfulfilled ambitions, often colliding with crowds of young hotel guests who frequently burst in to celebrate New Year's Eve. As with King Lear, the storm which rages outside reflects his turbulent emotions until he finally finds peace and resolution.

Until now, there has never been a full, accurate English translation of the epilogue to The Last Days of Mankind, German playwright Karl Kraus's early twentieth-century satirical play about the First World War. Yet the play's importance and influence is widely acknowledged and celebrated in Europe, for its uncompromising examination of human folly in the face of war and as a unique act of creativity and imagination, opening drama up to new challenges, techniques, and possibilities.

This translation is of the play's verse epilogue, The Last Night, which is a standalone work, and in many ways a distillation of all the material preceding it. A general flees the battlefield, representing all generals and military leaders. War correspondents trying to interview and photograph a dying man represent all war correspondents. Everything that took place in the main work reappears in this epilogue's verse in a moving and compelling summation.

This translation of The Last Night aims to introduce English-speaking readers to Kraus's great play for the first time in one hundred years, and to offer an annotated edition of the text for those who want to use it as a starting point for exploring Kraus's rich, disturbing, and profound world.

Greenberg has accomplished a magnificent literary feat. He has taken a great German work, until now all but inaccessible to English readers, and made it into a sparkling English poem, full of verve and wit. Greenberg's translation lives; it is done in a modern idiom but with respect for the original text; I found it a joy to read.--Irving Howe (on the earlier edition)

A classic of world literature, Goethe's Faust is a philosophical and poetic drama full of satire, irony, humor, and tragedy. Martin Greenberg re-creates not only the text's varied meter and rhyme but also its diverse tones and styles--dramatic and lyrical, reflective and farcical, pathetic and coarse, colloquial and soaring. His rendition of Faust is the first faithful, readable, and elegantly written translation of Goethe's masterpiece available in English. At last, the Greenberg Faust is available in a single volume, together with a thoroughly updated translation, preface, and notes.

A full-length play dealing with the German intellectuals' abandonment of the East German workers during their rebellion in 1953. Translated by Ralph Manheim. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book.

Fairy Tales gathers the unconventional verse dramolettes of the Swiss writer Robert Walser. Narrated in Walser's inimitable, playful language, these theatrical pieces overturn traditional notions of the fairy tale, transforming the Brothers Grimm into metatheater, even metareflections.

Snow White forgives the evil queen for trying to kill her, Cinderella doubts her prince and enjoys being hated by her evil stepsisters; the Fairy Tale itself is a character who encourages her to stay within the confines of the story. Sleeping Beauty, the royal family, and its retainers are not happy about being woken from their sleep by an absurd, unpretentious, Walser-like hero. Mary and Joseph are taken aback by what lies in store for their baby Jesus.