{"product_id":"castle-gripsholm-isbn-9781681373348","title":"Castle Gripsholm","description":"\u003cb\u003eA beguiling fable about a summer holiday in the Swedish countryside that transforms into a provocative parable about oppression and the evil awaiting Europe as the Nazis came to power.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eCastle Gripsholm\u003c\/i\u003e, the best and most beloved work by Kurt Tucholsky, is a short novel about an enchanted summer holiday. It begins with an assignment: Tucholsky’s publisher wants him to write something light and funny, otherwise about whatever Tucholsky wants. A deal is struck and the story is off: about Peter, a writer; his girlfriend, known as the Princess; and a summer vacation far from the hurly-burly of Berlin. Peter and the Princess have rented a small house attached to a historic castle in Sweden, and they have five weeks of long days and white nights at their disposal; five weeks for swimming and walking and sex and talking and visits with Peter’s buddy Karlchen and with Billie, the Princess’s best friend. It is perfect, until they meet a weeping girl fleeing the cruel headmistress of a home for children. The vacationers decide they must free the girl and send her back to her mother in Switzerland, which brings about an encounter with authority that casts a worrying shadow over their radiant summer idyll. Soon they must return to Germany. What kind of fairy tale are they living in?\"Some books, like most summer holidays, feel entirely undeserved and all too brief. Such is the case with the delightful \u003ci\u003eCastle Gripsholm.\u003c\/i\u003e\" —Jan Wilm, \u003ci\u003eMusic and Literature\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\"[A] monument to the loss of faith in language and the depredations upon creativity brought about by large-scale political evil . . . the formal disjointedness which terror and despair evidently incited now reads as more truthful—it’s certainly far more moving—than ever a more finished fiction, a more polished satire would have been.\" —\u003ci\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Observer\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"The first writers that come to mind when reading Tucholsky are Nabokov and Ford . . . [Tucholsky is] a master of the studied nonchalance of the tidily perverse.\" —\u003ci\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Times\u003c\/i\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e(London)\u003ci\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"One of the most brilliant writers of republican Germany . . . Tucholsky was known and feared for his sharp wit by all his enemies in Germany. More than anyone else, he foresaw what was coming there. What his readers enjoyed as capricious fantasies of a clever satirist [were] enacted in bitter reality.\" —\u003ci\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"The author, a polemical journalist during the last days of the Weimar Republic, chose in this, his only novel, to write about the pleasures of wine and women and the gratifications of friendship, and to do so in prose so luminous and exuberant that the bitterness of real life seems . . . an intrusion.\" —\u003ci\u003ePublishers Weekly\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Kurt Tucholsky wrote songs for Berlin revues, ridiculed the Nazis . . . and found refuge in Sweden only to take his own life. . . . There is scarcely any figure in English literature with quite the same degree of acid corrosiveness. One has the sense that all our little disappointments—in love, in business, in politics—are but manifestations of the collective disappointment that is life itself.\"\u003cbr\u003e—Michael J. Lewis, \u003ci\u003eCommentary\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003eKurt Tucholsky \u003c\/b\u003e(1890–1935) was born in Berlin to a  middle-class Jewish family. He received a law degree from the University  of Jena in 1915 and was conscripted to fight in World War I not long  after. A notably poor soldier, his aphorism likening soldiers to  murderers became a pacifist rallying cry. Tucholsky began his journalism  career while still a student, and he found success writing in a range  of forms, including the feuilleton, criticism, satire, poetry, and  lyrics for cabarets. Under both his name and various pseudonyms, his  work frequently appeared in the leftist intellectual organ \u003ci\u003eDie Weltbühne\u003c\/i\u003e (the World Stage), to which he would contribute on and off for the rest  of his life. Tucholsky’s collected writings amount to thousands of  pages and include a play, \u003ci\u003eChristopher Columbus\u003c\/i\u003e (1932); an illustrated book, \u003ci\u003eDeutschland, Deutschland über alles\u003c\/i\u003e (1929); and two works of fiction, \u003ci\u003eRheinsberg\u003c\/i\u003e (1912) and \u003ci\u003eCastle Gripsholm\u003c\/i\u003e (1931). He was married twice, to Else Weil from 1920 to 1924 and to Mary Gerold in 1924. In 1933, his last piece for \u003ci\u003eDie Weltbühne \u003c\/i\u003eappeared  in January; by August his German citizenship had been annulled and his  books burned en masse. The Nazis had denounced him as “one of the most  wicked of literary pornographers.” He divorced Mary to distance her from  Nazi persecution and lived in exile in Sweden on short-term visas under  threat of deportation, where he died from an overdose of sleeping  pills. There are two annual literary awards given in his name: the  Swedish PEN Tucholsky Prize and Germany’s Kurt Tucholsky Prize.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eMichael Hofmann\u003c\/b\u003e is a German-born, British-educated poet and translator. Among his translations are works by Franz Kafka; Peter Stamm; his father, Gert Hofmann; Herta Müller; and fourteen books by Joseph Roth. A recipient of both the PEN Translation Prize and the Helen and Kurt Wolff Prize, Hofmann’s \u003ci\u003eSelected Poems\u003c\/i\u003e was published in 2009 and \u003ci\u003eOne Lark, One Horse\u003c\/i\u003e in 2019. In addition to \u003ci\u003eCastle Gripsholm\u003c\/i\u003e, which was the first book he translated, New York Review Books publishes his selection from the work of Malcolm Lowry, \u003ci\u003eThe Voyage That Never Ends\u003c\/i\u003e, and his translations of Jakob Wassermann’s \u003ci\u003eMy Marriage\u003c\/i\u003e, Gert Ledig’s \u003ci\u003eStalin Front\u003c\/i\u003e, and Alfred Döblin’s \u003ci\u003eBerlin Alexanderplatz\u003c\/i\u003e. He teaches in the English department at the University of Florida.","brand":"NYRB Classics","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46300861202661,"sku":"NP9781681373348","price":14.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781681373348.jpg?v=1767723461","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/castle-gripsholm-isbn-9781681373348","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}