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Eleanor Wachtel interviews two unusual Authors. First, English-German writer W.G. Sebald about his requiem for a generation, The Emigrants.. Also, an interview with American poet, critic, and undertaker, Thomas Lynch. Lynch reads from his book The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade.

Part 3 of the series "At the Centre of Europe: A Changing Germany" - From Cologne, the novelist, essayist and Islam scholar, Navid Kermani - one of Germany's most important writers and thinkers. Kermani talks to Eleanor about current political and cultural issues in Germany, and his passion for the music of Neil Young.

This week on Writers & Company: Host Eleanor Wachtel in conversation with German novelist Jenny Erpenbeck. They discuss her life, work and her book The End of Days.

Voices from a New Europe: Writers in Western Europe at the End of 1992, Series Part 10 - "Europe, Europe." A special episode with German poet and essayist Hans Magnus Enzenberger. He discusses growing up in Germany during the rise (and fall) of Nazism, the reunification of east and west, and Germany in the new Europe.

Part 2 of "Ten Years After: the New Berlin." Host Eleanor Wachtel talks to writers from East to West, to reflect the reality of Berlin today - a new capital with an old history. This episode - Eleanor talks to law professor and judge Bernhard Schlink about his surprising bestseller The Reader - an unforgettably disturbing novel.

Part 3 of "Ten Years After: the New Berlin." Host Eleanor Wachtel talks to writers from East to West, to reflect the reality of Berlin today - a new capital with an old history. This episode - Eleanor talks to Pieke Biermann, an award-winning crime writer whose edgy, authentic fiction probes the underworld of the city, and to Brigitte Burmeister, a novelist from the former East who writes about Berlin before and after the Wall.

Part 4 of "Ten Years After: the New Berlin." Host Eleanor Wachtel talks to writers from East to West, to reflect the reality of Berlin today - a new capital with an old history. This episode, Eleanor talks with Erica Fischer, whose book Aimée & Jaguar documents a surprising war-time love story, and to Peter Schneider, an astute chronicler of Berlin and the German psyche.

Part 5 of Ten Years After: the New Berlin. Host Eleanor Wachtel talks to writers from East to West, to reflect the reality of Berlin today - a new capital with an old history. In this final episode of the series on Berlin, Eleanor talks with Ingo Schulze, a young novelist for the former East who's hailed as the new voice of post-unification Germany.

Interview with German author Peter Schneider. From The Wall Jumper to The German Comedy, novelist and political journalist Peter Schneider is a chronicler of the Berlin Wall and the German psyche. Now he has a new book called Couplings.

German novelist, poet and translator, Esther Kinsky, won multiple prizes for her novel River when it was first published in Germany. Now available in English, it's earning wide acclaim for its haunting evocation of landscape and loss.

From Berlin, more in the series 'At the Centre of Europe: A Changing Germany' with award-winning comic book artist Reinhard Kleist. Known for his graphic biographies, Kleist talks to Eleanor about portraying complex subjects through visual storytelling.

This week on Writers & Company - From Berlin, Ingo Schulze. Twenty years after the end of the wall, a re-imagining of life in the former East Germany by one of the country's best writers. New Lives by Ingo Schulze is available in paperback from Knopf Doubleday.

Julia Franck was 18 when the Berlin Wall came down on November 9, 1989. Born in the East, and raised mostly in the West, her life and writing embody the divide between the two cultures.

Jonathan Franzen says of German-Austrian novelist Daniel Kehlmann, "[He] has become the go-to guy in Central Europe for engagement with the weirdness of the postmodern world we inhabit." Kehlmann talks to Eleanor Wachtel about his novels 'F' and Measuring the World.