Comedy in a Minor Key: A Novel by Hans Keilson

A penetrating look at of unusual folks resisting the Nazi occupation—and, actual to its title, a dark comedy of wartime manners—Comedy in a Minor Key tells the story of Wim and Marie, a Dutch couple who first cover a Jew they realize as Nico, then will have to cast off his body whilst he dies of pneumonia. This novella, first revealed in 1947 and now translated into English for the first time, shows Hans Keilson at his best possible: deeply ironic, penetrating, sympathetic, and brilliantly brand new, an inheritor to Joseph Roth and Franz Kafka. In 2008, whilst Keilson won Germany’s prestigious Welt Literature Prize, the citation praised his work for exploring “the harmful impulse at work within the twentieth century, right down to its private mental and religious ramifications.”

released to celebrate Keilson’s hundredth birthday, Comedy in a Minor Key—and The loss of life of the Adversary, reissued in paperback—will introduce American readers to a forgotten magnificenceic author, a witness to global war II and a complicated storyteller whose books remain as fresh as once they first got here to mild.