Showing results by author "Daniel Kehlmann" in Literature & Fiction

Imagine being famous. Being recognized on the street, adored by people who have never even met you, known the world over. Wouldn’t that be great? But what if, one day, you got stuck in a country where celebrity means nothing, where no one spoke your language and you didn’t speak theirs...

At the end of the 18th century, two brilliant and eccentric young scientists set out to measure the world. Measuring the World recreates the parallel but contrasting lives of two geniuses of the German Enlightenment - the naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt and the mathematician and physicist Carl Friedrich Gauss.

Sebastian Zollner's failure as a journalist is matched only by his personal failures. Searching for redemption in the eyes of his peers, he heads off into the mountains to interview the eccentric, legendary painter Manuel Kaminski with the hope of writing his biography. Going blind and living in seclusion with his daughter, Kaminski could be working on his next masterpiece or easing into his final days. His artistic reputation hinges on any number of factors, but most prominently on a definitive biography.

The young Austrian writer Daniel Kehlmann conjures a brilliant and gently comic novel from the lives of two geniuses of the Enlightenment. Toward the end of the eighteenth century, two young Germans set out to measure the world. One of them, the Prussian aristocrat Alexander von Hum-boldt...