Northwestern World Classics brings readers the world’s greatest literature. The series features essential new editions of well-known works, lesser-known books that merit reconsideration, and lost classics of fiction, drama, and poetry. Insightful commentary and compelling new translations help readers discover the joy of outstanding writing from all regions of the world.
Flames from the Earth is an autobiographical novel by Isaiah Spiegel, one of the most revered Yiddish authors to survive the Holocaust, depicting the complex web of relationships in and around the Łódź Ghetto.
This novel of decadence and debauchery, set in Bucharest in 1910, follows four characters through bars, brothels, and landscapes of travel and escape. The 1929 book is a classic of Romanian modernism.
Expert new translations of two classics of the Weimar stage: Ferdinand Bruckner's Youth Is a Sickness and Criminals. Translator and renowned scholar Lawrence Senelick also provides an introduction and annotation.
In The Iphigenia Plays, award-winning poet and classicist Rachel Hadas offers luminous translations, in contemporary verse, of Euripedes’s fateful story of Agamemnon’s daughter.
Judgment (Mides-hadin in Yiddish) is a work of startling power by David Bergelson, the most celebrated Yiddish prose writer of his era. Born in Ukraine in 1884, and living in Berlin from 1921 until Hitler’s rise to power, Bergelson was executed in Moscow in 1952. This novel interweaves Judaism and socialism in a revolutionary, experimental, modernist style.
Fog is a new translation of the Modernist Spanish author Miguel de Unamuno’s Niebla. First published in 1914, Fog is considered an influential and enduring classic of European modernism.
Hasan Sijzi, also known as Amir Hasan Sijzi Dehlavi, is considered the originator of the Indo-Persian ghazal, a poetic form that endures to this day—from the legacy of Hasan’s poetic descendent, Hafez, to contemporary Anglophone poets such as John Hollander, Maxine Kumin, Agha Shahid Ali, and W. S. Merwin.
Widely considered the first poet in the Western tradition to address the matter of his own experience, Hesiod occupies a seminal position in literary history. His Theogony brings together...
Mikhail Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time was the first modern Russian novel. Published in 1840, it set a model of penetrating observation and psychological depth that would come to typify Russian literature. Its "hero," Grigorii Pechorin, also established a character type that became known in Russian fiction as "the superfluous man"—widely familiar from Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground. At once driven by pride and wracked by self-doubt, both shockingly self-revealing and blindly self-deceived, he flounders to affirm himself in a social world he despises yet yearns to dominate.
