All Quiet on the Western Front

by Erich Maria Remarque, Mitch Horowitz Narrated by Grover Gardner, Mitch Horowitz

Overview

One of modernity's greatest novels-fully reset with a new
introduction by PEN Award-winning historian Mitch Horowitz

History offers few records of war as vivid, haunting, and evocative as Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front. Burned by the Nazis, feted by critics, embraced by millions, Remarque's dramatized record of the German frontlines in World War I is central to the experience of modern literature and history.

As enthralling to twenty-first century readers as it was to those who first encountered the book in 1928, Remarque's landmark tells the story of a young German volunteer who, with his comrades, moves from idealism to fatalism witnessing the horrors of mass killing and the intimate deaths of friends or the disfiguring survival of young men languishing in field hospitals. It is a work, finally, not just about World War I but about all wars-with a moral core that exposes the lies by which we live.

This reset edition presents the original, classic translation by Arthur Wesley Wheen. A new introduction by historian Mitch Horowitz frames the book's ethical insights and considers whether they impact humanity's viewpoint. “We cannot live with ourselves without also living with war's lessons, resounding in this book,” he writes, “even as we prove incapable of acting on them.”

In considering why works like All Quiet on the Western Front fail to reduce the possibility of war, Mitch opens a new window on a work of posterity nearly a century old-and on humanity's eternal predicament.

“Its autumnal mood of loss, pathos and quiet grief left a lasting impression on a legion of readers. Because its subject was war-all war-and the pain and waste that accompany it, the book breathed an air of conciliation welcomed among those who had been the enemy. There are some books, like Uncle Tom's Cabin and The Grapes of Wrath, that sum up a moment of passionate yearning. These books are beyond criticism; All Quiet is one of that company.”-The New York Times

Editorial Reviews

The world has gained a great writer in Erich Maria Remarque. He is a craftsman of unquestionably first rank, a man who can bend language to his will.

From the Publisher

"Remarque has been served generally well by his previous English-language translators, but never better than by Kurt Beals of the University of Richmond. Mr. Beals’s shimmering version of this novel should become the standard for English readers. He commits to each page a burnished prose that beautifully stewards the original, and he captures more vividly than any other translator the sensory onslaught of Remarque’s narration, the unholy cacophony of trench battle. Mr. Beals also vividly renders Remarque’s indelible imagery: corpses bombed out of their caskets, the baffling presence of butterflies that ‘pause to rest on the teeth of a skull.’"— William Giraldi The Wall Street Journal

"A new translation by Kurt Beals...renders Remarque’s German in a colloquial register—sometimes caustic, sometimes lyrical—that is itself a product of the Great War...He gives us a version that can stand as Remarque’s contemporary."— George Packer The Atlantic

"A leaner, far more kinetic reading experience than that old Wheen translation...lively, unsentimental...a welcome invitation for a re-read."— Steve Donoghue Open Letters Review

"We all know how the story ends, but Beals’s taut, approachable translation casts the wartime classic in a fresh light."— New Criterion

"Kurt Beals brings an immediacy to what has been called the greatest war novel of all time, refreshing the text for a new generation of readers who might have only seen the Netflix version of Paul Bäumer and his comrades navigating the trenches of the First World War. \"— Smarty Pants Podcast, The American Scholar

"It is very fortunate that Kurt Beals has written a new translation of Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, and produced a crisp, fresh and very much more faithful to the German original version that brings new life to one of the classic novels to come out of the First World War, and makes it well worth reading again, or reading for the first time. Beals’s translation makes it clear why the book has sold millions of copies in almost every language, and been made into two major motion pictures—it is a moving story about war, all war, and not dated at all."— Michael Korda, author of Muse of Fire

"Almost a hundred years ago, All Quiet on the Western Front invented the anti-war novel. This fluent new translation captures the devastating experiences of ordinary soldiers with renewed urgency."— Martin Puchner, author of The Language of Thieves: My Family’s Obsession with a Secret Code the Nazis Tried to Eliminate

"[A] starkly effective new translation."— Matt Hanson Arts Fuse

Product Details

BN ID:	2940193603566
Publisher:	Maple Spring Publishing
Publication date:	01/01/2025
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

"Summer of 1918-Never was life in the line more bitter and more full of horror than in the hours of the bombardment, when the blanched faces lie in the dirt and the hands clutch at the one thought: No! No! Not now! Not now at the last moment!"
—from All Quiet on the Western Front

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