Youth – A Novel

Wolfgang Koeppen is the most important German novelist of the past seventy years: a radical, not to say terrifying, stylist; a caustic, jet-black comedian; a bitter prophet. His late, autobiographical work--the short, intense autofiction, Youth, translated here for the first time--is a portrait of the little north German town of Greifswald before World War I, and is a miracle of compression: this is not historical fiction, but a kind of personal apocalypse. Also included here, in Michael Hofmann's brilliant translation, is one of Koeppen's very last works: a short, fragmentary text spoken over a 1990 German television program depicting his return visit to the town of his schooldays.

Wolfgang Koeppen's (1906-1996) The Hothouse was named one of the Los Angeles Times Best Books of the Year and a New York Times Notable Book. Michael Hofmann is a poet and frequent contributor to "The New York Times Book Review", and is widely regarded as one of the world's foremost translators of works from German to English. He lives in London.