J.R. Ackerley offers a retrospective account of his sixteen-year companionship with his German shepherd.

"The last novel by one of Germany's most important postwar writers, All for Nothing was published in Germany in 2006, just before Walter Kempowski's death. It describes with matter-of-fact clarity and acuity, and a roving point of view, the atmosphere in East Prussia during the winter of 1944-1945 as the German forces are in retreat and the Red Army approaches. The von Globig family's manor house, the Georgenhof, is falling into a state of disrepair....

"Little Snow Landscape and Other Stories opens in 1905 with an encomium by the twenty-six- year-old Swiss author Robert Walser (1878-1956) to his Heimat and concludes in 1933 with a meditation on his childhood in Biel, the town of his birth, published inthe last of his four years in the cantonal mental hospital in Waldau outside Bern. Between these two poles, the book maps Walser's outer and inner wanderings in various narrative modes, including essaylets,...