Thomas mann

Resurrection has become its own literary genre. Though hardly a new phenomenon (Moby-Dick, for example, was out of print at the time of Herman Melville’s death), the success of such ‘forgotten’ classics as Suite Française, Stoner and Alone in Berlin proved that an author’s death and/or obscurity were no barrier for readers. So publishers from Faber to Virago, from the British Library to Penguin Modern Classics are hunting through back catalogues looking for writer recommendations, searching for the next unjustly lost voice. In Angel Bonomini, Peninsula Press has found an ideal candidate. How can such a powerful story have remained un-rediscovered for so long? A contemporary of Borges, Bioy Casares

Nothing is ever quite as it seems in the world of Olga Tokarczuk. Her latest novel starts with an epigraph taken from Fernando Pessoa: ‘The visible world goes on as usual in the broad daylight. Otherness watches us from the shadows.’ Wild deer were murder suspects in her surreal and beautiful 2018 novel Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead. This time nature itself plays a significant role. A daily glass or three of schwarmerei restores good cheer, sometimes generating hallucinogenic euphoria Though the novel describes itself as ‘a horror story’, it’s more a salutation to the power of the natural world and a celebration of difference. Tokarczuk

The 1930s saw Walter Benjamin write The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Marlene Dietrich rise to fame in The Blue Angel and Pablo Picasso paint ‘Guernica’. If history books mention these events, it’s usually as footnotes to the main European narrative of the pre-war decade. To shift the rise of Nazism, the Spanish Civil War, the Great Terror and other landmarks to the background, one could turn to the cultural history, or the micro-history. In his new book, the German art historian Florian Illies combines both genres to reconstruct the 1930s. Snippets from period documents, including private letters and diaries of notable figures of European and