Herta Müller Books

Herta Müller translates her visual impressions of the semblance of light, reflections in water, bleached boulders, and colorful shadows into sensitive poetic painting.

In "The Hunger Angel," Nobel Prize winner Herta Müller explores the harrowing experience of seventeen-year-old Leo Auberg during his five years in a Soviet labor camp. Through poetic intensity and stark realism, Müller reveals the absurdity of survival amid hunger, transforming mundane objects into symbols of hope and despair as Leo navigates his brutal reality.

'I know you'll return'. These are his grandmother's last words to him. Leo has them in his head as he boards the truck at 3am on a freezing mid-January morning in 1945. They keep him company during the long journey to Russia. They keep him alive - through hunger, pain, and despair - during his time in the brutal Soviet labour camps. And, eventually, they bring him back home.

An unexpected, exciting work from one of the most protean writers ever to win the Nobel Prize. To create the poems in this collection, Herta Müller cut up countless newspapers and magazines in search of striking phrases, words, or even fragments of words, which she then arranged in the form of a collage. Father's on the Phone with the Flies presents seventy-three of Müller's collage poems for the first time in English translation, alongside full-color reproductions of the originals. Müller takes full advantage of the collage form, generating poems rich in wordplay, ambiguity, and startling, surreal metaphors--the disruption and dislocation at their core rendered visible through stark contrasts in color, font, and type size. Liberating words from conformity and coercion, Müller renders them fresh and invests them forcefully with personal experience.

Set in Romania at the height of Ceausescu's reign of terror, this is the story of a group of young students, each of whom has left the impoverished provinces for the city in search of better prospects. But the city too bears the mark of the dictatorship's corrosive touch.

Juxtaposing reality and fantasy, nightmares and dark laughter, this title presents a collection of largely autobiographical stories based on Herta Muller's childhood in the Romanian countryside.

Paperback outing for the first novel from Muller since she won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature: a fierce and finely-wrought novel about a young Romanian woman's discovery of betrayal in the most intimate reaches of her life

A haunting and cinematic early masterpiece set in Ceaucescu's Romania from Herta Muller, the winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature.

From the winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature“[The Passport] has the same clipped prose cadences as Nadirs, this time applied to evoke the trapped mentality of a man so desperate for freedom that he views everything through a temporal lens, like a prisoner staring at a calendar in his cell.”—Wall Street Journal“A swift, stinging narrative, fable-like in its stoic concision and painterly detail.”—The Philadelphia InquirerThe Passport is a beautiful, haunting novel whose subject is a German village in Romania caught between the stifling hopelessness of Ceausescu’s dictatorship and the glittering temptations of life in the West. Stories from the past are woven together with the problems Windisch, the village miller, faces after he applies for permission to migrate to West Germany. Herta Müller (Herta Mueller) describes with poetic attention the dreams and superstitions, conflicts and oppression of a forgotten region, the Banat, in the Danube Plain. In sparse, poetic language, Muller captures the forlorn plight of a trapped people.

Exploring themes of exile and identity, the story follows Irene, a delicate woman from a German family in Romania who has recently emigrated to West Germany. As she navigates her new life, she becomes entangled with three troubled men, each reflecting her own struggles with political and social isolation. Through these relationships, Irene embarks on a profound journey of self-discovery, grappling with her sense of belonging and the complexities of her homeland.