Balzac (born 1799 in Tours, died 1850 in Paris) was an incorrigible optimist. But his hope of marrying into money was repeatedly shattered, until he was finally able to marry the Polish Countess Eveline Hanska shortly before his death. Balzac was renowned, and notorious, for his »on credit« lifestyle: mahogany furniture, oriental carpets, rare walking sticks, lemon kid gloves and a back exit to escape from his creditors. Legendary too was his passion for his work – garbed in a monk's habit and kept awake by black coffee, he created the most immense fictional work of all time, ›La Comédie Humaine‹, an entire universe of 1300 characters and their stories. Johannes Willms reveals Balzac's life before the reader's astonished eyes. He bases his biography on the most personal of documents, Balzac's letters, but differentiates between the shimmering veneer (that Balzac cultivated and lived) and the often more dramatic reality.

For a man who said of himself that he suffered from a disease called autobiographobia, this chronicle represents the ideal biography. A documentation of his life and works, constructed with the utmost precision and succinctness. The appendix includes an epilogue, the table of contents of Chekhov's first Russian annotated edition and a complete bibliography of German translations.

»You want my biography? Here it is.« It sounds sincere, but Chekhov meant it ironically – in reality he almost never banged his own drum. With an amazing wealth of contemporary photos and documents, this book attempts to approach its subject in the form of a biography in pictures. Far more than an illustrated life story of a great author, the book creates a comprehensive panorama of the history of contemporary Russian thought, the social and political atmosphere upon which Chekhov commented, the surroundings and conditions in which an oeuvre, unparalleled in world literature, came into being.

Those who believe that to read Shakespeare in anything but the original is nothing short of sacrilege have obviously never read Urs Widmers retelling of Shakespeares King plays! Widmer has transposed Shakespeares seven plays about betrayal, intrigue, murder and war at the English court into riveting, condensed prose an engaging introduction into a universe of hundreds of characters, but also pure pleasure for Shakespeare-lovers. Although Urs Widmers version remains true to the originals, he recounts the dramas as only he can with imagination and a modern touch, seen from a plethora of perspectives and told in a huge variety of voices, at times pure fairy tale, at times prose, but always captivating. All of this in Widmers inimitable style, as we know it from his successful novels ›A Devoted Life‹ and ›The Book of the Father‹. I imagined throughout that I was recounting events from earlier times, and not that I was describing the theatrical inventions of a writer named Shakespeare. All in all, I have attempted to bring together two ambitions: to write stories at once good and which, irrespective of their literary qualities, can be read as a summary of the original (Urs Widmer in his Introduction).