A series from Espresso Publishing House

Espresso German Classics

German fiction of the nineteenth century, newly translated into English.

German-language fiction of the nineteenth century reaches English readers as a short list of monuments. Goethe, Kleist, and later Mann. Standing behind that list is a whole literature working at novella length in the decades between, and its English reception has been much thinner. Paul Heyse won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1910, and an English reader today is unlikely to have read a page of him. Gottfried Keller, Theodor Storm and Theodor Fontane circulate more freely as names than as books.

Espresso German Classics is built for that middle ground. Every title is translated from the German by Renata Lenz, whose subject is the Poetic Realists and whose working conviction, and the reason she came to them, is that the books were never the problem. Each edition carries a full apparatus: an introduction, a translator’s note, notes on the individual stories, and whatever a reader needs to meet the book on its own ground. The series opens on 1 October 2026 with four of Heyse’s Italian novellas.

Titles in the Series

L’Arrabbiata and Other Italian Novellas

L’Arrabbiata and Other Italian Novellas Forthcoming

L’Arrabbiata, Die Stickerin von Treviso, Die Hochzeit auf Capri, Nerina  ·  Paul Heyse, 1854 to the mid-1890s

Translated by Renata Lenz

Kindle & Paperback Forthcoming 1 October 2026

A silk-spinner crossing between Sorrento and Capri bites the hand of the boatman who has loved her for a year. In a walled workshop in Treviso, a banner worked in thread puts a woman in the sight of the man the whole city has turned out to see. On Capri, the man the bride did not marry toasts her at her wedding, drains his glass and lets it smash on the floor, and the word for a smashed glass becomes the word for what has happened to him. In the house at Recanati, a silk case holds one underlined line of poetry, and a young Giacomo Leopardi cannot say aloud what it means.

Heyse was a Berliner trained in Classics and Romance philology who moved to Munich at twenty-four and stayed until his death in 1914. Munich was only where he lived. Italy was where his imagination was, and he went back to it again and again: to Rome, to Naples, to the coast below Vesuvius, to the islands. His fisherfolk are not scenery and his Capri is not a postcard.

He was the most articulate theorist of the German Novelle as well as its most practised writer. His Falkentheorie, the Falcon Theory, comes out of Boccaccio’s story of Federigo, who sacrifices his prized falcon to honour the woman he loves: a true novella turns on the one thing specific enough to set it apart from a thousand others, with an outline you could cut from black paper and recognize whole. These four are studies in exactly that. In 1910 Heyse received the Nobel Prize in Literature.

This volume brings all four into English in a new translation made directly from the German by Renata Lenz, with an introduction by Idara Crespi on Heyse, the Falcon Theory, and Italy as a German idea; her note on the translation; a biographical note on Heyse; story notes; and a glossary of the Italian his characters go on speaking inside his German sentences. Four complete stories in about a hundred and fifty pages.

Pre-order Kindle More about this edition

The first book in Espresso German Classics, on sale from 1 October 2026 in Kindle and paperback. Join the readers’ list to hear when the paperback goes on sale.

About the translator

Renata Lenz is a literary translator working from German into English. Her subject is the German Poetic Realists, Storm and Fontane and Keller, and above all Paul Heyse, whose disappearance from English-language reading lists has been her long-running preoccupation. Her working conviction, and the reason she came to him, is that the books were never the problem. She drafts fast and revises slowly, reading aloud against the German until the two texts agree about what kind of sentence this is, and she will tell you on the page which of her own choices she is still unsure about. She is from Freiburg im Breisgau, which spent four and a half centuries as Habsburg territory at the far western edge of the empire that owned it, and has never entirely settled the question of what it belongs to.

Read more about the translators of Espresso Publishing House →