THE LITTLE LILAC DOG – Great Literature in Detail

It is not just the devil that is in the details, but also the secret of great literature – if you know how to spot it. Michael Maar shows what the great works of world literature reveal to the attentive reader: how Sherlock Holmes’ method is different from Sigmund Freud’s, which German influence can be seen in Nabokov's Lolita, and what Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Stevenson and Dracula by Stoker are really about. What did Mark Twain think of Jane Austen, and how does Virginia Woolf in Mrs. Dalloway hint at her own fate? Daniel Kehlmann, Jonathan Franzen, Salman Rushdie: Even modern works are full of often-overlooked details. And the little violet puppy? It appears casually in Tolstoy's War and Peace – and follows us through the book.

Michael Maar does not just bring to life famous works and their creators. He is also a great storyteller himself, offering a fascinating mix of real and fictional encounters, stories, and connections. The details are the starting point of a journey through world literature – one that shows how worthwhile it is to keep re-reading the great novels.

"Michael Maar is the most brilliant hermeneuticist of detail among German literary critics and historians." Deutschlandradio

"An elegant, almost novelistic book about novels." Süddeutsche Zeitung