Essential Translations

Kafka's writings are characterized by an extreme sensitivity manifested in absurdity, alienation, and gallows humor, and these two particular collections of short pieces, A Country Doctor (1919) and A Hunger Artist (1924), represent later works in the corpus. Poems and Songs of Love is a translation of the collection Piyyutim ve-Shirei Yedidot by Georg Mordechai Langer, which contains an elegy to Langer's friend and mentor Franz Kafka. Langer and Kafka hailed from the same middle-class, assimilated, Jewish Prague background and shared a mutual interest in Hasidic culture, literature, and Hebrew. This collaborative translation by Elana and Menachem Wolff brings the fascinating work of Langer - poems as well as an essay on Kafka - to the English-reading public for the first time, and sheds light on a hitherto unexplored relationship.

Autumnal equinox. The End of the World sails on the Aegean Sea. Aboard is Marjolaine, a cook who recently lost her job at a greasy spoon. She rubs shoulders with chess players, a bookseller, a retired professor, a romance novelist, a blue-haired singer … Meanwhile, elsewhere on the planet, people play cards, while others celebrate, read, dream or cry, and still others die. All these lives intersect, meet up again, disappear, and above all tell us that there is not only one truth. In The End of the World is Elsewhere, volume four of her Fragments of the World tetralogy, Hélène Rioux creates an intricate and complex novel filled with topical issues and references to history and literature.