Robert Musil

Presents the story of bullying, snobbery, and homoerotic violence at an elite European boys academy, reflecting the attitudes and cultural changes that led to the rise of fascism.

The Confusions of Young Törless

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Roman

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Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törless

From one of the greatest novelists of the 20th century, these chiseled essays and sketches written between 1920 to 1929 are playful, moving, exploratory and full of soul and humor. In playful reflections on art and humanity, Musil describes a fly's tragic struggle with flypaper, the guests in a Roman boarding house, the laughter of a horse and more.

Posthumous Papers of a Living Author

Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften

Ritchie Robertson

Mike Mitchell

'between the life we live and the life we feel...there is the invisible border, like a narrow gate' Set in a boarding school in a remote area of the Habsburg Empire at the turn of the last century, The Confusions of Young Törless is an intense study of an adolescent's psychological development as he struggles to come to terms with his conflicting emotions. Through his relationship with two other boys Törless is led into sadistic and sexual encounters with a third pupil which both repel and fascinate him. Estranged from everyday life, Törless gradually learns to accept his experiences and describe them with analytical precision. The novel is based on the author's own experiences at an Austrian military academy. A school story with a difference, Törless extends the scope of fiction with its non-judgemental presentation of transgressive sexuality and violence. It is a profoundly disturbing exploration of a non-moral outlook on life and of dictatorial attitudes that prefigure the outbreak of the First World War and the rise of fascism. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Best known for his magnum opus, The Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil is a central figure in the modernist movement, as important to the development of 20th-century literature as Joyce, Kafka, Mann, or Proust. In Five Women - a book as crucial to the understanding of The Man Without Qualities as Joyce's Dubliners is to Ulysses - he displays a face that is by turns extravagant, sensual, mystical, and autobiographical.

Five Women

Der Mann Ohne Eigenschaften

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Vol. 1 e Vol. 2

O homem sem qualidades

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Niteliksiz Adam 1

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O jovem Törless

Robert Musil's Thought Flights vividly evokes the secrets, challenges, and mundanities of interwar life in cosmopolitan Vienna and Berlin. The texts presented here have been selected by translator Genese Grill from Musil's Nachlass and collected for the first time under the title Thought Flights. They include material originally published in journals, newspapers, and magazines - but not included in Musil's Posthumous Papers of a Living Author - as well as literary fragments and heretofore unpublished texts. Despite the temporal, geographical, and cultural distance between Musil's world and ours, our own time and troubles are all too recognizable in Musil's portrayals of the "age of money," of simulation, and of standardization. Thought Flights is a lament of contemporary complacency, optimism, and homogenization as well as a celebration of living words and original thought by one of the great Modernists of the 20th century. As an astonishing master of metaphor and self-described "Monsieur le Vivisecteur," Musil explores the psyches and lives of himself and his contemporaries with illuminating insight. The lucid, striking prose of his stories and vignettes, and the wise and witty commentary of his glosses, show Musil's response to innovations in technology, art, and politics, and his efforts to enact a strategy for both illuminating and ameliorating the crisis of language that haunted his contemporaries. Moving effortlessly from discussion of fashion to Kant's categorical imperative, le vivisecteur writes with humor, lyricism, and fervor in an open genre availing itself of poetic prose, philosophical essay, fictional narrative, and feuilletonistic lightness. Through unlikely combinations and metaphoric syntheses, Musil brings "beauty and excitement" into the world, and when things that are usually separate unite, thoughts "fly." With this publication, the now growing English-language corpus of the author of The Confusions of Young Torless, Five Women, and The Man without Qualities is expanded further. Other volumes of Musil's writings will be forthcoming from Contra Mundum Press over the next decade.

Robert Musil

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