A feisty schoolteacher and a headstrong business mogul come together, determined to make war not love. Rustin Kicklighter is as powerful and reserved as Malina Sheridan is caring. He swears that everyone has a price, while she just as adamantly decries the opposite to be true, especially where she is concerned. Rustin cannot let go and allow himself to trust her. He is determined to find her flaw. And she is determined not to fall in love. Malina came to the Litman School to start over, but her new life is threatened when Rustin makes it known that he intends to tear down the school and erect a skyscraper in its place. She should hate him for it. She should, but...

First multi-year cumulation covers six years: 1965-70.

Now a New Directions book, the legendary novel that is “equal to the best of Virginia Woolf and Samuel Beckett” (New York Times Book Review) 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.