Experience a unique literary journey through the world of wine, and discover new perspectives on pleasure and time!

Ilija Trojanow is not just a literary collector of worlds but also a trained sommelier. His close friendship with a leading maker of Riesling serves as inspiration for this love letter to wine. What does wine-drinking mean for our culture? Wine-drinking is a dialogue, says Trojanow. With many interlocutors. With time. With the soil. With a wine-grower. With the self and the unplumbed mysteries of individual taste. The enjoyment of wine is a highly individual experience. For Ilija Trojanow, wine is compensation for being driven out of paradise. Trojanow reflects on time, terroir, nature and culture, on capital, taste, dégustation and drunkenness. A poetic musing on the secret of wine.

From Karl Kraus and Michael Kohlhaas to stubbornness and The Taming of the Shrew: Daniela Strigl explores the crucial importance of defiance.

A defiant person is one who clings to something unreasonable, sometimes against their better judgement. Defiance is associated with stubbornness, obstinacy, and yet it’s also a prerequisite for resistance: to defy someone is to resist them, which may include those with more power. In this essay, Daniela Strigl grapples with the historical and literary phenomenon of rebellion against authority. Troublemakers may have a bad name and ‘lateral thinking’ is perhaps increasingly discredited these days, but mavericks still command our respect. Free-thinking women, in particular, have long been considered especially provocative. But does all this make defiance a virtue? And doesn’t art in a hostile environment depend on defiance?

A love letter by philosopher and passionate record-collector Konrad Paul Liessmann to the instrument that unites all instruments as one.

In the age of digitalisation, record players and good old vinyl discs are enjoying a remarkable renaissance. For Konrad Paul Liessmann, however, this came as no surprise. He has always stayed true to the record player. The revolving record, the slender needle and the delicate grooves exert a powerful fascination for him. Turning his attention to his beloved record player, the philosopher Konrad Paul Liessmann intertwines his personal musical experiences with a brief cultural history of listening. He tells the story of how sound has been stored and reproduced, from the first gramophone to modern streaming services, and asks to what extent our relationship with music has been changed as a result of its technological reproducibility.

Gesa Olkusz uses spare, pared-back prose to explore human loneliness—and to overcome it through the magical power of her language.

A simple story, written in poetic and crystal clear prose: Parker and Kasimir immigrated from Poland to the USA when they were young, brought by their mother so that they could have a better life. After this single act of resolve, their mother loses all interest in life, and the brothers develop a powerful symbiotic bond, isolated from those around them. They survive in this foreign country but never feel at home there. Parker works nights as a private chauffeur, while Kasimir never leaves the house. When footloose Luzia moves in with them, she brings a new breath of life, but in doing so she destroys the brothers’ almost wordless bond. When the young woman leaves abruptly for Panama, one thing is clear: Kasimir is going to follow her, even to the ends of the world.

A story of young love—between two people who have grown old

They haven’t seen each other for more than sixty years, but one day Luisa bumps into HIM on the street: Heinrich was once the love of her life, her childhood sweetheart, but they fell out of touch. They arrange to meet again, and this rendezvous is followed by many more … As they talk, Luisa and Heinrich look back on their short-lived romance and on the decades they have spent apart. Gradually they grow closer again, travelling in their conversations through the highs and lows of their separate lives. Is a new love story developing, in the magic of the present? Because: ‘I think we’re both at an age now when it’s best not to put things off.’

Discomfort takes us on a journey under the thin skin of civilisation—and into the overwhelming power of the natural world.

Lorenz Urbach, a teacher, is increasingly troubled by a vague discomfort: a political dissatisfaction, a sense of being overwhelmed and world-weary. Suddenly he has an outburst of aggression—he gets into a fight and his life is turned upside down. When reports start to appear of a blood-thirsty animal causing trouble in the Alps, it triggers deep-seated memories in Lorenz. The media is speculating wildly—could it be a wolf? or perhaps a human being?—and Lorenz thinks of his childhood friend Theresa, the perennial outsider, the social dropout, forever primed for violence … He sets off on a solitary hike into the mountains, grappling with the forces of nature, searching both for the ‘monster’ out in the wilds and for the origins of the violence in himself.

These small masterpieces of the imagination are also an impassioned plea against the human exploitation of nature.

Dazzling blue beetles, furry moths, bold grasshoppers and shimmering dragonflies are the heroes of Barbara Frischmuth’s new short stories. Yet when we look more closely, we realise they are about more than just carefully observed insects: they are about the delicate symbioses between humans and nature, about rare hybrid beings, half girl and half beetle, about talking dragonflies and about what we can learn from the ingeniousness of grasshoppers. Written with affectionate humour, these stories reveal how profoundly human beings are a part of nature. As gardener and poet Barbara Frischmutch never tires of repeating: our only chance of survival is to develop a relationship with nature based on respect and mindfulness.

Writing with tremendous charm, Russo tells the story of two people in love, of a stolen block of parmesan cheese, and of romance in an uncertain age.

Masha and Iggy are in love, yet somehow they can’t quite connect: Iggy wants to be a filmmaker, but as yet he hasn’t managed to get into film school. Masha is lost in the labyrinth of online dating—and studying medicine in her spare time. A chance meeting brings the two together, but how does anybody fall in love these days? And how do you talk about it when you can talk about literally anything else, and when you’re aware of so many other types of relationship? Before Masha and Iggy become a couple, they must first travel to Italy with a dying woman, rob a church, swim naked in Lake —and learn that sometimes it’s best if you don’t say anything at all. And like all partners in crime, they pull off all sorts of madcap exploits before they face the hardest one of all: letting someone in …

Clemens Berger paints a wildly comical picture of our society in this touching tale of solidarity, struggle for survival and motherly love.

Babies need milk – from the breast or the bottle. This is where Clarissa begins with the “House of Liquid Gold”: women like Maya, a single mother who was previously making a living from casual jobs, express their surplus milk in a comfortable environment and take a share in the profits. Things are going well until the biggest manufacturer can no longer supply families with formula; then breast milk becomes a matter of life and death. When Maya takes the side of the desperate women and their hungry babies, she becomes a social media icon. Clemens Berger’s fast-paced satyr takes us on the rollercoaster of emotions Maya experiences on social media: she is celebrated, suffers backlash and receives offers of millions of euros, not to mention death threats – and she has to find her own way.

With a subtly humorous touch, Jana Volkmann tells a story of animals, humans and egalitarian forms of coexistence that are as self-evident as they are revolutionary.

Two women are on their way home in central Vienna one summer’s night when they happen upon a horse without a rider in a small alley. The slightly neglected animal trots along behind them until they reach their house in the suburbs, where it takes up residence in the garden. From this point on, the two women look after the latest addition to the household. What seems like a fairytale fantasy at first grows into an extraordinary novel about the coexistence between animals and humans, about animal rights and exploitation, self-determination and its limits. With elegance and wit, Jana Volkmann tells a highly topical story in which chicken factories are stormed and pigs gallop across the high street – a story in which every individual must decide for themselves how we, collectively, want to live in the future.