In These Great Times: A Karl Kraus Reader by Karl Kraus. Montreal. 1976. Engendra Press. 0919830021. Edited By Harry Zohn. With translations by Joseph Fabry, Max Knight, Karl F. Ross. and Harry Zohn. 263 pages.

DESCRIPTION -  ‘My readers think that I write for the day because my writings are based on the day. So I shall have to wait until my writings are obsolete. Then they may acquire timeliness.' The voice of Karl Kraus (1874-1936), Vienna's legendary satirist, polemicist, and pacifist, today speaks with a timeliness and a freshness that the passing of four decades has not diminished. Kraus assailed the sins of early 20th-century Europe in vitriolic fashion, often finding himself virtually alone in the unpopularity of his stance. In 1919 Kraus indicated the compass of his themes as follows: ‘Sex and untruth, stupidity, abuses, cadences and cliches, printer's ink, technology, death, war and society, usury, politics, the insolence of office . . . art and nature, love and dreams. . . ' The present Reader includes samples of Kraus's thoughts and feelings on all these subjects, in prose and in verse, culminating in a readable and performable condensation of modern literature's most trenchant anti-war drama, THE LAST DAYS OF MANKIND. The English-speaking public thus has available for the first time a representative selection from the writings of one of the modern era's most influential and original thinkers.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Karl Kraus (1874-1936) was the editor of and chief contributor to the journal Die Fackel, the author of dramatic works including The Last Days of Mankind, and a translator of many foreign masterpieces into German. Jonathan McVity holds a bachelor's degree in English from Oxford University.

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