The German Book Office has picked three books for its August book of the month. The three--one classic and two contemporary novels--are part of Melville House's Art of the Novella line:
Michael Kohlhaas by Heinrich von Kleist ($10, 9780976140726/0976140721), a classic of German literature that was first published in 1810, "tells the story of a 16th-century man who suffers injustice and takes the law into his own hands. After horse trader Kohlhaas protests an unfair tax, things escalate until he becomes the heroic leader of a rebellion against the king."
Close to Jedenew by Kevin Vennemann, translated by Ross Benjamin ($13, 9781933633398/1933633395) "begins like a classic German fable: Children from the rural village of Jedenew, Poland, get together late at night to play together in the dark woods. But their game is to pretend they live in the imaginary world of the Jedenew that came before them--when it wasn't occupied by the Nazis, and their Jewish friends weren't mysteriously disappearing one by one."
