front cover of Absent without Leave
Absent without Leave
Heinrich Boll
Northwestern University Press, 1995

front cover of And Never Said a Word
And Never Said a Word
Heinrich Boll
Northwestern University Press, 1994
"First published in 1953, And Never Said a Word is one of Heinrich Böll's richest works, a novel that explores marriage with depth and compassion. Böll evokes an entire emotional world in the space of a day and a half as a husband and wife alternately relate a story of love and isolation, poverty and injustice. Weakness, as well as strength, provides the subtle emotional threads that form the bonds of their love; and they discover married life takes a far greater toll on those who love than on those whose hearts are empty. ""Böll is a master storyteller."" --New York Times ""Böll has a talent with fiction that is not hindered by translation--a low-key grace of style and a depth of human understanding."" --Publishers' Weekly"
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The Bread of Those Early Years
Heinrich Boll
Northwestern University Press, 1994

front cover of Bronstein's Children
Bronstein's Children
Jurek Becker
University of Chicago Press, 1999
"East Berlin, 1973: an 18-year-old Jew discovers that his father's friends are holding prisoner a former Nazi concentration camp guard in the family cottage. The three older men have handcuffed the ex-Nazi to the bed and are interrogating and torturing him in an attempt to get him to admit to his war crimes. . . . Becker keenly shows the tension between members of the Holocaust generation and their children, who are unable to understand the complexity of that nightmarish era of human history."—Booklist

"[A] chilly, disquieting novel about historical slippage; about the seemingly inevitable decline of horror into a vague and generic recollection. The East German writer has devised something between story and allegory to evoke the cold generational millennium that separates a father, with his concentration-camp memories, from a son, adrift in a society with no memories whatsoever."—Richard Eder, Los Angeles Times Book Review

"Mr. Becker, writing simply and clearly in an unstrained narrative, speaks with the voice of knowledge, and we do well to listen to him."—Eva Figes, New York Times Book Review

Jurek Becker (1937-1998) is the author of Jacob the Liar, Sleepless Days, The Boxer, and Amanda Herzlos.
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front cover of Irish Journal
Irish Journal
Heinrich Boll
Northwestern University Press, 1998

front cover of A Soldier's Legacy
A Soldier's Legacy
Heinrich Boll
Northwestern University Press, 1994
In 1943 Wenk, a German soldier guarding the Normandy coast, finds himself in a war where the main enemies are loneliness and misery. Corruption is rampant in the High Command: supplies are being siphoned off, and the starving, exhausted soldiers must cross their own minefields to steal potatoes from nearby farms. Against all army rank and protocol, Wenk becomes friends with Lieutenant Schelling, whose protests on behalf of his men have incurred the wrath of another officer. When the company is transferred to the Russian front, heightened fear, suspicion, and mistrust explore the soldiers' barely maintained order into a chaos of desperation. "The great strength of this short novel is its steadfast refusal to glamorize. . . . The clear-eyed wisdom that emerges from it makes it a remarkable achievement." --William Boyd, New Republic "Böll is a master storyteller." --New York Times
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front cover of The Train Was on Time
The Train Was on Time
Heinrich Boll
Northwestern University Press, 1994


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