In Five Portraits, one of the most acute critical thinkers of our time presents essays on five of the most important writers of the past hundred years: Rainer Maria Rilke, Paul Celan, Robert Musil, Martin Heidegger, and Walter Benjamin. The result is a remarkable examination of a moment when these writers, caught between the dream of creating an abiding masterpiece and the reality of a brutal culture fascinated by apocalyptic catastrophe, deliberately put themselves and their work at the center of the storm. Written in elegant and jargon-free prose, Michael Andre Bernstein's essays create a vivid image of an epoch whose aspirations and torments continues to shape the world we inhabit today.

MICHAEL ANDRE BERNSTEIN is a professor of English and comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley. His books include Foregone Conclusions: Against Apocalyptic History; Bitter Carnival: Ressentiment and the Abject Hero; and The Tale of the Tribe: Ezra Pound and the Modern Verse Epic. his work regularly appears in the New Republic, the Times Literary Supplement, and other publications.