Siegfried Lenz Die Erzählungen. Mit einem Geleitwort von Marcel Reich-Ranicki. (The Collected Short Stories: With a preface by Marcel Reich-Ranicki) Hoffmann und Campe, February 2006, 1600 pp ISBN: 3-455-04285-6 This year sees Siegfried Lenz's eightieth birthday, and the new edition of his highly regarded short stories, now published to mark the occasion, will be welcome on many counts. One is that some of them have so far been previously published only in newspapers or magazines. Another is the critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki's stimulating and characteristically opinionated introduction. And the third is simply that the book pays worthy tribute to the man sometimes referred to as 'the classroom's favourite author', and whose influence continues to be felt, for instance, in pieces such as Das Feuerschiff or Die Phantasie, to name but two. This, then, is the definitive Lenz collection, and the place which publishers and translators should surely be quarrying to find material for a long-overdue translation.