Research Catalog

The short end of the Sonnenallee

Title
The short end of the Sonnenallee / Thomas Brussig ; translated from the German by Jonathan Franzen and Jenny Watson ; introduction by Jonathan Franzen.
Author
Brussig, Thomas, 1964-
Publication
  • New York : Picador, 2023.
  • ©2023

Items in the Library & Off-site

Filter by

1 Item

StatusFormatAccessCall NumberItem Location
TextUse in library JFD 23-1917Schwarzman Building - Main Reading Room 315

Details

Additional Authors
  • Franzen, Jonathan
  • Watson, Jenny (Translator)
Description
xv, 137 pages; 21 cm
Summary
  • "Thomas Brussig's classic German novel, now appearing for the first time in English, is a moving and miraculously comic story of life in East Berlin before the fall of the wall."--
  • Young Micha Kuppisch lives on the nubbin of a street, the Sonnenallee, whose long end extends beyond the Berlin Wall outside his apartment building. Like his friends and family, who have their own quixotic dreams--to secure an original English pressing of Exile on Main St., to travel to Mongolia, to escape from East Germany by buying up cheap farmland and seceding from the country--Micha is desperate for one thing. It's not what his mother wants for him, which is to be an exemplary young Socialist and study in Moscow. What Micha wants is a love letter that may or may not have been meant for him, and may or may not have been written by the most beautiful girl on the Sonnenallee. Stolen by a gust of wind before he could open it, the letter now lies on the fortified "death strip" at the base of the Wall, as tantalizingly close as the freedoms of the West and seemingly no more attainable. The novel confounds the stereotypes of life in totalitarian East Germany. Brussig's novel is a funny, charming tale of adolescents being adolescents, a portrait of a surprisingly warm community enduring in the shadow of the Iron Curtain. As Franzen writes in his foreword, the book is "a reminder that, even when the public realm becomes a nightmare, people can still privately manage to preserve their humanity, and be silly, and forgive."
Uniform Title
Am kürzeren Ende der Sonnenallee. English
Alternative Title
Am kürzeren Ende der Sonnenallee.
Subject
  • 1945-1989
  • Teenage boys > Germany (East) > Fiction
  • Berlin Wall, Berlin, Germany, 1961-1989 > Fiction
  • Cold War > Fiction
  • Totalitarianism > Fiction
  • Communities > Germany (East) > Fiction
  • Interpersonal relations > Fiction
  • Teenage boys
  • Berlin Wall, Berlin, Germany, 1961-1989
  • Totalitarianism
  • Communities
  • Interpersonal relations
  • Germany (East)
  • Germany > Berlin
Genre/Form
  • Novels.
  • Satirical literature.
  • Historical fiction.
  • Psychological fiction.
  • Fiction.
Call Number
JFD 23-1917
ISBN
  • 9781250878991
  • 1250878993
LCCN
2022057944
OCLC
1330404231
Author
Brussig, Thomas, 1964- author.
Title
The short end of the Sonnenallee / Thomas Brussig ; translated from the German by Jonathan Franzen and Jenny Watson ; introduction by Jonathan Franzen.
Publisher
New York : Picador, 2023.
Copyright Date
©2023
Edition
First American edition.
Type of Content
text
Type of Medium
unmediated
Type of Carrier
volume
Chronological Term
1945-1989
Added Author
Franzen, Jonathan, translator, writer of introduction.
Watson, Jenny (Translator), translator.
Research Call Number
JFD 23-1917
View in Legacy Catalog