The seventh cross

OLD IN ART SCHOOL By Nell Painter. (Counterpoint, $26.) At 64, retired from her job as a historian, Painter does the unexpected: She decides to get a B.F.A. and M.F.A. in painting. After enduring teachers and students who tell her she'll never really be an artist, she spends a lot of time meditating on the question of who is allowed to create art. the seventh cross By Anna Seghers. Translated by Margot Bettauer Dembo. (New York Review Books, paper, $16.95.) Seghers, writing in 1938, laid out her plan for this novel in a letter: "A tale that makes it possible to get to know the many layers of fascist Germany through the fortunes of a single man." She delivers with this thriller, offering an incredible portrait of resistance, adjustment day By Chuck Palahniuk. (Norton, $26.95.) The chronicler of male disgruntlement is back, this time with a dystopian story about a world in which young men draw up a national hit list of all the older men who should be killed so that they can take power, visible empire By Hannah Pittard. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $25.) Set in 1962 following a plane crash that kills most of Atlanta's high society, Pittard's novel combines a sense of personal loss and turmoil with greater societal change as the civil rights movement arrives at its peak, rendezvous with oblivion By Thomas Frank. (Metropolitan/Holt, $24.) From the author of "What's the Matter With Kansas?," this bleak collection of essays shows American society in a state of disintegration. & Noteworthy "Lots of people in my orbit have been talking about Sheila Heti's 'Motherhood.' I haven't gotten there yet, but I've been reading the anthology she edited with Heidi Julavits and Leanne Shapton, women in clothes, which examines the things we put on to present ourselves to the world. The book is for anyone who thinks about getting dressed, especially those for whom it is a source of joy, and supports the idea that clothes have much more to do with money, family, intimacy, memory and selfmythologizing than the thing we call fashion. I also recently started how to write an autobiographical novel, by Alexander Chee, a collection of essays that make similar arguments about fiction. In one of them, he likens the impulse to integrate personal material with imagined worlds to the desire to perform one's own tarot reading. Both inclinations speak to a false sense of control over the images we project. We never really see ourselves, but we can fan out the parts we find most beautiful." - BONNIE WERTHEIM, STAFF EDITOR, STYLES, ON WHAT SHE'S READING.

Originally published in 1942 and available now in its first unabridged English translation, this trenchant tale about life in Nazi Germany is notable for being one of the earliest works of fiction to acknowledge the existence of concentration camps. In the early years of World War II, seven prisoners escape from the Westhofen concentration camp into the nearby town, where several of their spouses and families live, including the ex-lover and child of one prisoner, George Heisler. Seghers provides a panoramic view of the town and its citizens, many of whom are indifferent or oblivious to the turmoil of the distant war, but her main point-of-view character is George, who struggles desperately to elude recapture and frets that "the community that supports and surrounds every person-his blood relatives, lovers, teachers, bosses, and friends-had been turned into a network of living traps." The novel's title refers to a torture reserved for concentration camp escapees that bears out Heisler's fears about "how profoundly and how terribly outside forces can reach into a human being." Seghers skillfully expresses the inner lives of her characters and their stories are consistently suspenseful. For all the grimness of its events, the novel ends with an affirmation of the human spirit that "in that innermost core there was something that was unassailable and inviolable." (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Released in 1942, this was one of the first novels to tackle the horror of the concentration camps. Protagonist Heisler, an escapee from Westhofen, survives on the run thanks to help from those opposed to the Nazi killing machine. Still very powerful, this edition includes a foreword by Kurt Vonnegut. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Anti-fascists fight back in World War II Germany in this novel that was written during the war.When seven prisoners escape from the Westhofen concentration camp, the commandant, Fahrenberg, erects seven crosses, made from plane trees, in the yard. Each cross is studded with nails. Each cross is then hung, one by one, with a prisoner, as each of the escapees is found and recaptured. German novelist Seghers (Transit, 2013, etc.) introduces each of the escapees but is primarily concerned with one: George Heisler, once notorious for his womanizing, now for his ability to withstand interrogations without either giving up names or allowing a smirk to drop from his features. This novel, which first appeared in English in 1942 and was made into a film starring Spencer Tracy, is only now appearing in unabridged form in English. It's concerned not with Jewish camp inmates (the word "Jew" appears only once or twice in the entire novel) but with anti-fascist German nationals. It's Heisler's activities on behalf of the Communists that land him in camp, though the precise nature of those activities remains vague. Seghers is mainly concerned with his escape and with the network of characters affected in one way or another by that escape. So we meet Fritz, the hapless young man whose jacket Heisler steals; Franz, a former friend who radicalized Heisler before Heisler stole his girlfriend, Elli, and made her his wife; Elli herself, long estranged from Heisler; Elli's father, who makes a living hanging wallpaper; commandant Fahrenberg; and moremany more. Through these many characters, Seghers is able to provide a thorough autopsy on German society of the time, with its various classes and varying levels of enthusiasm for the current government. Still, there are almost too many characters to keep track of, and we're still meeting new faces in the novel's final pages. Likewise, the narrative itself is loose and rangy in placesit could have benefited from some tightening. But there's no dearth of suspense, and Seghers' skill in describing the many dangers, risks, and accompanying paranoias of the time is unimpeachable.A suspenseful but occasionally long-winded account of a prisoner's escape from a German concentration camp. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.