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….”

In Malina, originally published in German in 1971, Ingeborg Bachmann invites the reader into a world stretched to the very limits of language. An unnamed narrator, a writer in Vienna, is torn between two men: viewed through the tilting prism of obsession, she travels further into her own madness, anxiety, and genius. Malina explores love, “deathstyles,” the roots of fascism, and passion.

“Fascism is the first thing in the relationship between a man and a woman, and I attempted to say that here in this society there is always war. There isn’t war and peace, there’s only war."—Ingeborg Bachmann

Winner of the 2020 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize

The Fox and Dr. Shimamura toothsomely encompasses East and West, memory and reality, fox-possession myths, and psychiatric mythmaking. As an outstanding young Japanese medical student at the end of the nineteenth century, Dr. Shimamura is sent—to his dismay—to the provinces: he is asked to cure scores of young women afflicted by an epidemic of fox possession. Believing it’s all a hoax, he considers the assignment an insulting joke, until he sees a fox moving under the skin of a young beauty… Next he travels to Europe and works with such luminaries as Charcot, Breuer and Freud—whose methods, Dr. Shimamura concludes, are incompatible with Japanese politeness. The ironic parallels between Charcot’s theories of female hysteria and ancient Japanese fox myths—when it comes to beautiful, writhing young women—are handled with a lightly sardonic touch by Christine Wunnicke, whose flavor-packed, inventive language is a delight.