A novel of paradise lost—from the bestselling author of Grand Hotel, which was turned into an Academy Award-winning movieSet against the backdrop of the Dutch invasion of Bali in 1906, and the resulting "mass suicide" of the Balinese royalty, Love and Death in Bali tells the moving story of the peasant Pak and his family and friends, and the tragedy that is their shared fate. Vicki Baum skillfully intermeshes several different stories that all come together in the infamous puputan, the slaughter and mass suicides that brought the old Bali to an end in 1906 and finally extended Dutch rule from the north over the south of the island. Written within living memory of these bloody events, Love and Death in Bali is the story of a passionate yet peaceful and deeply spiritual people who defy the Dutch imperial forces through an act that would bring them certain death—and certain rebirth.Now reissued in a completely reedited edition...

A grand hotel in the center of 1920s Berlin serves as a microcosm of the modern world in Vicki Baum's celebrated novel, a Weimar-era bestseller that retains all its verve and luster today. Among the guests of the hotel is Dr. Otternschlag, a World War I veteran whose face has been sliced in half by a shell. Day after day he emerges to read the paper in the lobby, discreetly inquiring at the desk if the letter he's been awaiting for years has arrived. Then there is Grusinskaya, a great ballerina now fighting a losing battle not so much against age as against her fear of it, and Gaigern, a sleek professional thief, who may or may not be made for each other. Herr Preysing also checks in, the director of a family firm that isn't as flourishing as it appears, who would never imagine that Kringelein, his underling, a timorous petty clerk he's bullied for years, has also come to Berlin, determined to live at last now that he's received a medical death sentence. All these characters and...