Balzac's Horse

Hofmann, Gert

Minerva Press

A novel seen from the perspective of a German child. Starting at the end of World War II with a family hiding in a cellar from the Allies, it proceeds backwards, through memories, to reveal their town's shameful history. The author won the Alfred Doblin Prize for "The Spectacle at the Tower".

Our Conquest

Minerva

The narrator and his fiancee have come to a remote Bolivian village to inform an exiled elderly man he is free to return to Germany, but end up following the old man through funeral preparations for his murdered brother and listening to bizarre tales

Before the Rainy Season

Literature & Fiction

Grove Pr

It is the early 1930s in Limbach, an industrial village suffering from the depression. Karl Hofmann narrates silent movies at the local cinema. The job pays poorly and is largely unnecessary, as the films have subtitles and the crowds are small, but Karl sees himself as an artist: he is convinced only his explanation will make the movies accessible to the ever-shrinking audience. When the "talkies" arrive and he loses his job after a quarrel with the Jewish theater owner, Karl loses his sense of purpose and joins the Nazi Party--the first step toward his horrible end.

The Film Explainer

Humor & Entertainment

Northwestern University Press

A beautiful, bittersweet, and very funny novel about growing up, Luck is perhaps Gert Hofmann's finest book, and is translated into English by the author's son, the wonderful translator Michael Hofmann. Luck is the story of a nuclear family: father, mother, daughter and son. But all is not as it seems, for Mother is in love with Herr Herkenrath, and now father and son will have to leave home. Or will they? The mother sits in her room, squirting herself with perfume, waiting for her new man to arrive and her old one to go. Everyone makes their own luck in this life! she tells her children. The father sits in his room, planning another novel. Why doesn't his writing sell? Is it just bad luck? Thomas Mann's first book was rejected five times, after all. When he takes his son for a walk, the townspeople wish them all the luck in the world. We'll see about that! he says. The little sister is the lucky one: she gets to stay at home. Then again, the son won't have to put up with Herr Herkenrath's annoying habits and his smelly feet. So maybe he's lucky to be going. But will they really leave for Russdorf? Or is it Berlin? Or Africa? Or will Father manage to win Mother round at the very last minute? Only time will tell, but time is running out. The moving van is on its way. Soon Herr Herkenrath will arrive and the whole family will sit down for the last time to coffee and crumb cake. But maybe, with any luck, Herr Herkenrath will choke on the crumbs. A child's-eye view of a family in decline, Gert Hofmann's Luck mixes humor and suspense with a heartbreaking pathos.

Luck

Literary

New Directions

Goethe, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, Tolstoy, Einstein - all praised the writings of Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-1799), a mathematician, physicist and astronomer by profession, and an aphorist and satirist on the sly. In Lichtenberg and the Little Flower Girl, novelist Gert Hofmann weaves a fictionalized tale of Lichtenberg's real life romance with "the model of beauty and sweetness," Maria Stechard, a flower seller he meets one day near his laboratory in Gottingen.

Lichtenberg and the Little Flower Girl

Hofmann, Michael

Luck is the beautiful, bittersweet, and very funny novel about a nuclear family living in a small German town -- wonderfully translated by Gert Hofmann's son, acclaimed translator and poet Michael Hofmann. It begins and ends on the same day, the last day of the narrator's childhood as he prepares to leave home with Father, because Mother is waiting for her new man to arrive, and his sister will stay behind. Or will they really leave? Mother sits in her room, squirting herself with perfume. Father endlessly postpones his packing, hoping for a magical conversation that will mend his marriage. His little sister spits on her new dress, and asks....

Goethe, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, Tolstoy, Einstein—all praised the writings of Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-1799), a mathematician, physicist and astronomer by profession, and an aphorist and satirist on the sly. In Lichtenberg and the Little Flower Girl, novelist Gert Hofmann weaves a wondrous fictionalized tale of Lichtenberg’s real-life romance with "the model of beauty and sweetness," Maria Stechard, a flower seller he meets one day near his laboratory in Gottingen. "The greater part of what I commit to paper is untrue, and the best of it is nonsense!" says Lichtenberg, our hunchbacked hero. His daily life of "wrestling with death," of electricity machines and exploding gases, is plunged into new passion the day he encounters the Stechardess: "Something is found that was lost for a long time." Soon he teaches her to read and write, she helps him keep house... and then? Colored with Lichtenberg’s boisterous, enlightening meditations on life, death and everything in-between, this stunning fable-of-awakening was described by The Washington Post as "a quiet and convincing description of human happiness... a fine and original book."

Lichtenberg and the Little Flower Girl (New Directions Paperbook)

Reference

The narrator and his wife, whose marriage is shaky, are stranded in a desolate Sicilian village and are taken, by a menacing guide, on a tour of poverty, misery, grotesquery, and morbidity

The Spectacle at the Tower (English and German Edition)

Contemporary

Fromm Intl

As their relatives and neighbors cower in the cellars of their village houses, several hungry boys venture out into the streets of their German town, now conquered by the enemy, and are arrested and interrogated

Our Conquest (English and German Edition)

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Hofmann, Gert. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Hofmann, Gert

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Hofmann, Gert. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Balzac's Horse

Our Conquest

Before the Rainy Season

The Film Explainer

Luck

Lichtenberg and the Little Flower Girl

Luck

Lichtenberg and the Little Flower Girl (New Directions Paperbook)

The Spectacle at the Tower (English and German Edition)

Our Conquest (English and German Edition)