Part family memoir part lost historical narrative and part archive of literary and publishing
history Endpapers paints a powerful portrait of a Jewish German family divided by exile
abandonment and emigration that reaches back in history to the assimilation and anti-Semitism
of the early nineteenth century and through the violence of the twentieth century and beyond.
Endpapers features the history of a pivotal figure in transatlantic publishing which is sure
to interest reviewers. Kurt Wolff the author's grandfather founded the Kurt Wolff Verlag in
1913 in Germany where he was the first publisher of many of the works of Franz Kafka
including The Metamorphosis alongside authors like Émile Zola and Anton Chekhov. When Kurt
Wolff emigrated to the United States in 1941 he founded Pantheon Books which developed a
singular reputation for publishing the best European writers including Boris Pasternak's
Nobel-winning novel Doctor Zhivago and works by Carl Jung Giuseppe de Lampedusa and Günter
Grass. Many never-before-recounted details of this publishing history come to life in
Endpapers. The Wolff papers have been very closely held by the family for decades and the
author is the first person to investigate them at this level. Much of this literary history has
never before been published. Endpapers will appeal to lovers of books that illuminate a
historical moment through the lens of a single family such as New York Times bestseller The
Hare with Amber Eyes or My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me by Jennifer Teege. It will also
appeal to readers interested in German cultural and intellectual history fans of books like
The Lady in Gold and The Rape of Europa. We will do outreach to known Germanophiles including
Jonathan Franzen who has championed and translated the works of Karl Kraus one of the most
important early authors of the Kurt Wolff Verlag. Alongside Franzen we hope for support from
writers like Ron Chernow Daniel Mendelsson Erik Larson Anna Funder Alan Furst Caroline
Moorhead Daniel Kehlmann Francine Prose Tom Stoppard Alexander Waugh Philippe Sands
Christopher Browning John Kamper and authors of The Zhivago Affair Peter Finn and Petra
Couvée among others. We will do outreach to German institutions in the States that work in the
literary and cultural spheres including the administrators of the Helen & Kurt Wolff
Translation Prize awarded each year for a work translated from German into English and
published in the USA. We will also do early academic outreach to build on for the paperback.
Endpapers contains over fifty family photographs that give faces to the characters in the book
alongside a beautifully illustrated family tree. Grove Press will be publishing in the UK
where the team is already very enthusiastic about the book's potential and German rights are
under offer. Alexander Wolff served as a staff writer for Sports Illustrated for over thirty
years and has written and edited several highly acclaimed and bestselling books on basketball
but this is the first time he is turning to his own family story.
