New Releases by Franz Werfel

1929. Werfel, Czech-born poet, playwright, and novelist, whose central themes were religious faith, heroism, and human brotherhood. Class Reunion begins: The examining magistrate, Dr. Ernst Sebastian, extinguished his half-smoked cigar. It was his custom not to smoke during office hours, and there was still one case to be heard. It was nearly six o''clock and the sun''s rays struck more and more obliquely across the examination-chair, which hulked in front of his writing-table like a stricken man. Sebastian was anxious to hasten matters. See other titles by this author available from Kessinger Publishing.

This books tells the story of an Austrian cook, Teta, who attempts to buy herself into heaven in a round-about way by paying for her nephew''s clerical education. Teta assumes that when her nephew becomes a priest, his grateful prayers will prove her salvation. Neither her plans, nor her nephew, turn out as she''d expected.

1915 It is a dark year for the Armenian people. The Great War is raging through Europe, and in the ancient, mountainous lands to the west of the Caspian Sea the Islamic Turks have begun systematically to exterminate their Christian subjects. Based on actual historical events, this stirring, poignant novel unfolds the story of Gabriel Bagradian -- an Armenian-born officer in the Ottoman army -- and the five thousand Armenian villagers that he leads to the top of Musa Dagh. There, in the Caucasus, on "the mountain of Moses," for forty days these brave Armenians will heroically suffer the siege of Turkish forces hell-bent on their annihilation. Written in the early 1930s and prefiguring the ethnic horrors of World War II, Franz Werfel''s The Forty Days of Musa Dagh remains the only significant treatment, fiction or nonfiction, in any literature, of the first in the twentieth century''s long series of holy wars and lamentable inhumanities. Book jacket.

A German watchman of sixty-four must live until his sixty-fifth birthday in order that his wife and epileptic son may benefit from his insurance.