Richard Stokes Books

Alfred Brendel - internationally famous as the supreme interpreter of the piano music of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and Liszt - is also a poet. Between concert engagements and recording sessions, he has found the time to write this collection of sardonic, wise, funny, and beautifully turned verses. Penetrating light is thrown on those parts of the author's endlessly subtle mind and sensibility which his devoted audiences can barely have guessed existed. The supernumerary finger of the book's title, the appearance of Brahms's smelly ghost, the war between the bearded and the beardless, the camel's loss of his humps, the appropriateness of laughter, the eventual appearance of Godot and the usefulness of identical twins are among the important subjects he tackles. With the help of Richard Stokes, Alfred Brendel has produced English versions of his original texts which go out to meet the reader with refreshing directness and wit.

On his thirtieth birthday, the bank clerk Josef K. is suddenly arrested by mysterious agents for an unspecified crime. He is told that he will be set free, but must make regular appearances at a court in the attic of a tenement building while his trial proceeds. Although he never comes to know the particulars of his case, Josef K. finds his life taken over by the opaque bureaucratic procedures and is tormented by the psychological pressures exerted by his legal nightmare. Published the year after the author's death, but written ten years earlier, The Trial is the most acclaimed of Kafka's three novels, and is both a haunting meditation on freedom and the powerlessness of the individual in the face of state power, and an ominous prefiguration of the totalitarian excesses of the twentieth century.

Millions compete for exposure on Google, Yahoo!, and MSN Live Search, but 97% of them fail to get results. Search advertising specialist Richard Stokes reveals why and provides solutions.

The 36 poets set by Wolf are each given their own chapter: a brief essay on the poet is followed by a note on Wolf's connection with the writer, extracts from letters that throw light on the Songs and convey his mood at the time of composition, and the texts and translations.