Complete Stories spans three decades of work from one of the most important German-language writers of the last century. Each of these short stories, beautifully translated by Philip Boehm and Tess Lewis, depict people at a crossroads, facing decisions about life, truth, love, and death. In addition to the collections ‘Three Paths to the Lake’ and ‘The Thirtieth Year,’ this volume includes many stories that have never appeared in English before. In this collection, we find Ingeborg Bachmann exploring the limits of language and experience, grappling with the maladies of modern civilization, with love and sex, with patriarchy and its brutalities: ‘Where does fascism begin? It doesn’t begin with the first bombs that were dropped. It begins in relationships between people. Fascism lies at the root of the relationship between a man and a woman….’
