“The truth is often hidden in the most ordinary places.” Chapter 1: The Discovery Inspector Imanishi, a seasoned Tokyo detective, is called to investigate a gruesome murder at […]
German literature
The Mussel Feast
“We were waiting for father, and as we waited we ate mussels.” Chapter 1: The Waiting Begins The novel opens with a mother and her two teenage children […]
German literature
Group Portrait with Lady
“People are always saying that life isn’t a novel—but then, what is it?” Chapter 1: Introduction to the Protagonist The novel begins with an unnamed narrator researching the […]
German literature
The Safety Net
“Everything was so fragile, so easily shattered—like the safety net they thought they had built.” Chapter 1: The Setting The novel opens in a small West German town […]
German literature
The Man Without Qualities
“The man without qualities is not a man who lacks qualities, but one for whom the qualities he has do not matter.” Part 1: A Sort of Introduction […]
German literature
Tauben im Gras (Pigeons on the Grass)
“The pigeons on the grass alas.” – Gertrude Stein (Epigraph referenced in the novel) Chapter 1: A Post-War City in Fragments The novel opens in an unnamed German […]
German literature
Death in Rome
“Rome is the city of visible history, where the past of a whole hemisphere seems moving in funeral procession with strange ancestral images and trophies gathered from afar.” […]
Russian literature
The Gentleman from San Francisco
“The body was carried to Naples in the hold of the same steamer that had brought him to Capri, and there, in a cheap coffin, it was placed […]
Russian literature
The Nose
“The nose knows.” Part I One morning, the barber Ivan Yakovlevich discovers a nose in his breakfast bread. Horrified, he recognizes it as the nose of Collegiate Assessor […]
Russian literature
Gooseberries
“A man needs not six feet of land, not a farm, but the whole globe, all of Nature, where unhindered he can display all the capacities and peculiarities […]