Erich Kästner Libri

Luisa viene da Vienna e tiene i lunghi capelli sempre sciolti sulle spalle, mentre Carlotta è di Monaco e porta le trecce. Queste però sono davvero le uniche differenze tra le due ragazzine, che per il resto sono identiche come due gocce d'acqua. Com'è possibile? Prima di incontrarsi per caso nello stesso campeggio estivo, infatti, Luisa e Carlotta non si sono mai viste (o almeno così credono). A poco a poco il mistero si dipana e le due scoprono di essere gemelle, divise, ancora piccolissime, dal divorzio dei loro genitori. Ora che finalmente si sono ritrovate, quindi, Luisa e Carlotta decidono che non si separeranno mai più e studiano un piano infallibile per far tornare insieme mamma e papà.

Emil è in un bel pasticcio: sul treno per Berlino, un misterioso ladro lo ha derubato di tutto il suo denaro e si è dileguato. Che farà nella grande città, senza un soldo e senza amici? Piangersi addosso non serve a nulla, perciò il ragazzo decide che non tornerà a casa prima di aver ritrovato il ladro e averlo consegnato alla polizia. Ma l'impresa si rivelerà tutt'altro che semplice, e il nostro eroe riuscirà a compierla solo grazie a un gruppo di improvvisati investigatori. Età di lettura: da 8 anni.

Martin's school is no ordinary school. There are snowball fights, kidnappings, cakes, a parachute jump, a mysterious man called 'No-Smoking' who lives in a railway carriage and a play about a flying classroom. As the Christmas holidays draw near, Martin and his friends - nervous Uli, cynical Sebastian, Johnny, who was rescued by a sea captain, and Matthias, who is always hungry (particularly after a meal) - are preparing for the end of term festivities. But there are surprises, sadness and trouble on the way - and a secret that changes everything. The Flying Classroom is a magical, thrilling and bittersweet story about friendship, fun and being brave when you are at your most scared. (It also features a calf called Eduard, but you will have to read it to find out why).

First published in German in 1931, the first English edition of this book was published in 1932 by Jonathan Cape in an expurgated edition. Set in the crumbling Berlin of the 1920s, it is a tale of despair. This edition is unexpurgated. The author also wrote Emil and the Detectives.

A small boy has his money stolen while on his way to Berlin but tracks down the thief with the help of some friends.

Going to the Dogs is set in Berlin after the crash of 1929 and before the Nazi takeover, years of rising unemployment and financial collapse. The moralist in question is Jakob Fabian, “aged thirty-two, profession variable, at present advertising copywriter . . . weak heart, brown hair,” a young man with an excellent education but permanently condemned to a low-paid job without security in the short or the long run. What’s to be done? Fabian and friends make the best of it—they go to work though they may be laid off at any time, and in the evenings they go to the cabarets and try to make it with girls on the make, all the while making a lot of sharp-sighted and sharp-witted observations about politics, life, and love, or what may be. Not that it makes a difference. Workers keep losing work to new technologies while businessmen keep busy making money, and everyone who can goes out to dance clubs and sex clubs or engages in marathon bicycle events, since so long as there’s hope of running into the right person or (even) doing the right thing, well—why stop? Going to the Dogs, in the words of introducer Rodney Livingstone, “brilliantly renders with tangible immediacy the last frenetic years [in Germany] before 1933.” It is a book for our time too.