A Runaway Horse by Martin Walser revolves around two friends, long separated, who meet on vacation. One is an idle teacher; the other, an optimistic go-getter. The teacher discovers that one cannot avoid dealing head-on with life any better than one can reason with a runaway horse. Peter Schneider's Lenz, which takes its title from the melancholy novella by Georg Buchner, is about the life of a young intellectual in 1960s East Germany. This is its first publication in English. The Sunday I Became World Champion, by F. C. Delius, portrays a postwar German village through the eyes of a preacher's son -- a boy whose stutter is helped by the success of the national soccer team.