Tony Kushner says that “Heiner Müller was one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century and will undoubtedly be among the most indispensable of the twenty-first, the terrors of which his plays seem to have anticipated and anatomized,” but his name and his work largely remain mysteries in the United States, even for fans of Lincoln and Angels in America. PAJ Publications, however, has been publishing Müller’s work since the 1980s, and this week the mailman brought Heiner Müller After Shakespeare, a new collection from PAJ of two of the German dramatist’s Shakespeare adaptations (of Macbeth and Titus Andronicus) and his essay “Shakespeare a Difference.”

Although he may be best known for another Shakespeare adaptation, Hamletmachine, this is the first time his two late Shakespeare plays have been translated into English, here by Carl Weber and Paul David Young. It is a welcome addition to the slowly growing shelf of Müller translations into English (Seagull Books published a collection last year). The PAJ volume is available for pre-order here, and there’s more information about the volume at the TCG Web site here. I last wrote about Müller on 5 October 2011. (The newcomer to Müller’s work can be entrusted to Jonathan Kalb’s book on the playwright for an English-language, American-inflected introduction.)