Gunter Grass

German poet, novelist, playwright, sculptor, and printmaker, who, with his extraordinary first novel die BLECHTROMMEL (1959, The Tin Drum) became the literary spokesman for the German generation that grew up in Nazi era. Grass received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999. The author has described himself as "Spätaufklärer", a belated apostle of enlightenment in an era that has grown tired of reason. He has once said, that writers, by giving us ''mouth-to-ear artificial respiration,'' help keep humanity alive. [Read more]

Dog Years
Fawcett Crest, 1963 (PhP 80.00)
In this ferocious novel of the Hitler years and their aftermath, the author of "The Tin Drum" tells a brilliant, bizarre and savage tale of "the love-hate and blood brotherhood of Nazi and Jew. Grass is the strongest, most inventive writer to have emerged in Germany since 1945, and much of what is active conscience in the Germany of Krupp and the Munich beer halls lies in this man's ribald keeping.

Headbirths or The Germans Are Dying Out
Fawcett Crest, 1983 (PhP 80.00)
It is Summer 1980. A quintessential German couple, both high school teachers, take a vacation trip to Asia. But wherever they are, they can't get away from problems at home, both personal and political. Here is wicked fun in the superior new novel by Germany's most distinguished contemporary writer.

The Call of the Toad
Harvest Book, 1992 (PhP 120.00)
In what many have called his most accessible satire since "The Tin Drum," Gunter Grass tells the poignant, irreverent story of two people who find adventure in love and business. The love is late-middle-aged; the business is the cemetery business. The couple's vision is to offer plots in Gdansk to those Germans who had been exiled after World War II. He, the German, will provide the bodies, cash, and know-how; she, the Pole, will provide the human warmth and political fervor. "The Call of the Toad is a take of entrepreneurship taken to absurd extremes as both the German and the Polish characters are skewered with style, tenderness, and baroque inventiveness.

The Tin Drum
Vintage Books, 1964 (PhP 100.00)
The Greatest German novel written since World War II, "The Tin Drum" is the autobiography of thirty-year-old Oscar Matzerath, who has lived through the long Nazi nightmare and who, as the novel begins, is detained in a mental institution. Willfully stunting his growth at three feet for many years, wielding his tin drum and piercing scream as anarchistic weapons, he provides a profound yet hilarious perspective on both German history and the human condition in the modern world. Translated into all major languages, "The Tin Drum"--Gunter Grass' first novel--is an internationally acclaimed work of literature.