Susan Bernofsky

Franz Kafka's classic 1915 novella tells the story of traveling salesman Gregor Samsa, who wakes one morning to find himself transformed into some sort of monstrous insect. In her new translation, Susan Bernofsky strives to capture both the humor and the humanity in this macabre tale, underscoring the ways in which Samsa's grotesque metamorphosis is just the physical manifestation of his longstanding spiritual impoverishment.

"Three generations (grandmother, mother, son) of polar bears are famous, both as circus performers and writers in East Germany: they are polar bears who move in human society, stars of the ring and of the literary world. In Chapter One, the grandmother matriarch in the Soviet Union accidentally writes a bestselling autobiography. In Chapter Two, Tosca, her daughter (born in Canada, where her mother had emigrated) moves to the DDR and takes a job in...

Swiss writer Robert Walser (187-1956) wrote many of his manuscripts in a highly enigmatic, reduced form. These narrow strips of paper, covered with tiny antlike pencil markings a millimeter high, came to light only after the author's death in 1956. At first considered random pencil markings or a secret code, the microscripts were in time discovered to be a radically minuscule form of antique German script: a whole story was deciphered on the back...