In the United States, Great Britain, and Canada, the three most widely known and read German authors of novels and short fiction from the postwar period are certainly Heinrich Böll, Günter Grass, and Christa Wolf. Most of the works of these writers were promptly rendered in English and appeared in translation within several years of their original publication. Such has also been the case for the novels of Siegfried Lenz, who is best known in both German and English literary circles for his novel Deutschstunde (1968; The German Lesson, 1971). The publication of The Selected Stories of Siegfried Lenz now makes the short stories and folk tales of this veteran author accessible to North American and other English-speaking audiences.

Although Lenz is a respected writer in his native land, his work may simply be too well-liked by the general reading public abroad to often be the object of study among critics in the United States. Similar to the fate of Hermann Hesse, whose work fell out of grace with literary scholars in the academy after the enormous resurgence of popular interest in his novels during the sixties, the writings of Siegfried Lenz by and large remain outside the canon, graduate reading lists, and undergraduate anthologies. In spite of, or perhaps due to his popularity as a fiction writer in Germany, his books are not often taught at the university level in this country. And despite this academic snubbing of Lenz by professors and scholars of German literature in the States, much of his short fiction is exemplary of the German narrative prose written since the end of World War II.

Breon Mitchell has chosen a broad selection of Lenz's stories from those collected in Die Erzählungen 1949-1984. Under the headings "Tales of Our Times," "Tales from the Village," and "German Lessons," he presents the translated pieces chronologically within each section. That is, while the narratives are arranged under each heading according to when they were written, Mitchell gives no explanation in his brief afterword as to the reasoning behind these groupings—which are apparently thematic or stylistic—except to say that the editorial decisions have been approved by the author. Thus the tales from both of Lenz's imaginary villages, Suleyken and Bollerup, appear in the book's middle section, although the tales of Suleyken stem from the mid-fifties and those of Bollerup from twenty years later. It is possible that the translations adhere to an ordering similar to that of the German edition (which unfortunately was unavailable), yet it would have been helpful if the logic behind this somewhat arbitrary arrangement of the contents had been clarified. The translator, whose most recent effort is an English version of Lou Andreas-Salomé's memoirs (Looking Back, 1991), here provides highly readable texts throughout.

There is a great range in the type of short fiction in this collection, from the endearing invented folk narratives about village life, each no longer than half a dozen pages in length, to several brief selections from the book's first part which spoof the practices of such contemporary institutions as the research academy ("Eskimo Lamps, or The Trials and Tribulations of a Specialist") and the military ("An Acceptable Level of Pain") with caustic irony and wit. Two longer stories which close the "Tales of Our Times" section are memorable on account of both content and narrative style. "The Exam" relates a day in the life of a young housewife who, having sacrificed her own studies for her marriage, awaits...