7 German Books Coming Out in 2018

Franz Kafka is widely regarded as one of the major figures in 20th-century literature. The German-speaking Bohemian Jewish novelist wrote a wide collection of critically acclaimed work. This new ebook, Franz Kafka: The Best Works, compiles his greatest writings, including work from his novels, novellas, short stories and parables. It includes famous works like Amerika, The Trial, ‘The Metamorphosis,’ ‘A Hunger Artist,’ and many more. This English-friendly edition has been professionally formatted for ease of use.

This is a bilingual collection of poetry from Gershom Scholem, the world renowned Kabbalah and Jewish Mysticism scholar. This volume of Scholem’s work contains dark, lucid political poems about Zionism and assimilation, uses a similar style related to German and Jewish philosophers, Walter Benjamin, Hans Jonas, and more. The volume collects poems spanning from 1915 to 1967, shedding a light on the importance of poetry throughout Scholem’s life. The collection is translated by Richard Sieburth, who acknowledges the relevance and power Scholem’s work still has today. This new edition makes a German classic accessible to an English speaking audience.

The Air Raid Killer is a two-part fictional series written by Frank Goldammer and translated by Steve Anderson about a Dresden detective’s struggle to fight against the system and uncover a dark mystery. The book is a crime novel, following the protagonist Max Heller and his search for the Fright Man, a killer who has murdered a young nurse under the cover of a nighttime air raid siren. Set in the final days of the Third Reich, Heller and his wife struggle to survive on rations while fearing for their lives, but against the odds he pushes forward to unmask the killer.

Yiza is the story of Yiza, Schamhan and Arian, three homeless children on the run. The trio meet at a shelter for migrant children, not long after Yiza arrives in Germany and is abandoned. The story focuses on their journey as they run away from the shelter and try to survive on the fringes of society. Six-year-old Yiza is the protagonist of the book and narrates in simple language and an innocent charm.

For the first time in English, The Nibelungenlied: with The Klage tells wonderful tales of love, deception, murder, and revenge. A German classic that defies traditional medieval storytelling, William Whobrey’s new volume brilliantly conveys both the sense and the tenor of the original text.

19th-century folktale collector Franz Xaver von Schönwerth left behind an amazing collection of unpublished Bavarian folktales recently found in a city archive in Germany. Von Schönwerth published but a single volume of these tales in his lifetime, leaving many of them to be forgotten over the years. He recorded the tales he collected as they were told, taking them straight from the source, and as a result they retain many of their darker themes. Now, award-winning illustrator Willow Dawson and translator Shelley Tanaka have brought these long-lost tales back to life in an epic collection, White as Milk, Red as Blood: The Forgotten Fairy Tales of Franz Xaver von Schönwerth.

The Seventh Cross is a World War II novel about a German prisoner of war fleeing for the border and the variety of Germans he meets throughout his journey. This suspenseful thriller was an international bestseller and adapted into both a movie and a comic book in the United States. However, because the original English translation was heavily abridged, Margot Bettauer Dembo’s new translation is the first chance English readers will have to read Anna Segher’s famous novel in full.