A novel with a big bang and full of subtle irony: funny, tragic, stunning!

Novak is a late bloomer when it comes to the wide world of emotions, which he discovers in a hospital, of all places. Because his hospital roommate keeps him from sleeping, the Indonesian nurse Manuela lends him her walkman and tapes, thus infecting him with her love of opera. After being discharged Novak somehow can’t get back into the routine of his regular, ordinary life. Manuela has opened his ears – not only to opera, but also to the annoying racket of everyday life: noise from lawn mowers, jackhammers and his wife Herta. While he continues his new of listening to opera, Herta suspects another woman behind his new passion. She’s not that far off the mark. But Manuela suddenly disappears. Was she merely an illusion on the stage of Novak’s middle-aged dreams? Or could his wife somehow be involved in her quiet disappearance? Even without her, the grand finale is a striking as an opera: cruelly dramatic.

Capitalism is a vast country.

Life is merely a chance and Georg Asamer has grabbed it: He made it as the boss of a highly successful advertisement agency. After he appoints Andy Sykora as his successor, he recognizes that he has become old – business strategies have changed. Hans Falenbruck, a random acquaintance of Sykora and heir to a large pharmaceutical enterprise, has kept up with the times: He travels to Vienna in order to conquer the Eastern European market. Then there is Irma Wonisch, Falenbruck’s old flame from a good family, who gets together with Tom Loschek. The aspiring broker sparks a sense of adventure in all of them with his appealing investment ideas… Peter Rosei leads us into the heart of a world where – at times by chance, yet always inevitably –destructive wishes and high hopes collide. “Geld!” is a laconically fascinating book, a sharp witted puzzle with comedic undertones.

This book will knock you off your feet with its humor, quick pace, intelligence and loads of emotion.

“So, no sex, no god, no dreams” – otherwise Lu will talk about anything. She tells her parents that she’s going to kickboxing camp for two weeks. Actually, she has decided to take some time off and rents a room in a Bed and Breakfast called “Zur schönen Gegenwart” (the beautiful now). Lu is 16 and she doesn’t have a story, not a real one, not yet. But she can talk like others breathe. In the B’n’B she meets Tulpe Valentin, an old author who has written eight novels, but finished the last one years ago. She thinks she has left her life behind along with her writing. The time off that Valentin and her ill B’n’B neighbor are taking is more like waiting for the right moment to give up. “A punch hurts less if you see it coming.” But then Lu comes along and starts talking and Valentin listens and writes it all down – it’s her last novel, because she sees life right in front of her. It’s not her own, but another life is continuing.

How close can you get to someone you barely know – even if he is your own father? A man who is almost the same as everyone else.

Karl H. was neither German, nor Austrian nor Yugoslavian. And yet he was all of three in his lifetime, thanks to historical coincidences. His story begins between the Wars, in the former Crown Land Styria, in the new Kingdom of Yugoslavia, today’s Slovenia. From there, his path led to Kaprun, Trieste, Sarajevo, where after years serving in the army as a interpreter for partisan interrogations he returned to Salzburg. Karl H. was not a Nazi, but he also wasn’t a regime critic. So what was he? A man stumbling through the 20th century. A father who remained a mystery to his son. With immense intensity Albert Holler traces the life of a person he was closely familiar with, yet who always remained a stranger. This novel is an attempt to understand and to come as close to a person as literature can.

Ivan, an innocent anarchist like all children, measures up a world which is in moral ruins. He becomes the leader of a children’s revolt, spreading violence in the city and casting it into an apocalyptic state. the hell of a war is revealed on playgrounds and in courtyards. There are no prisoners in this hell engulfing an entire city. Outrageous things happen. In the end the children have become weary – not only of killing, but also of living. Michaela Falkner uses shreds of our everyday reality to create a scenario that slowly, but steadily boils into a feverish monstrous nightmare that may have already come true. Her language is hard and poetic, her attitude unsparing and radical.

It’s finally here! The sequel to the successful novel “At the postman’s expense”

The three postmen Ürdinger, Blumauer and Deuth have all retired. Every week they get together at the local pub, reminisce about the old working days and comment on changes in today’s world. They speak about everything and everyone, including the national mail’s partners. The scope of their conversations extends to subjects such as crime (sometimes), “feminism” (more frequently), folklore (every now and then) and zoology. After all, there’s lots to be discussed: whether it’s the postmistress’ refusal to deliver mail to the local nudist camp or the two men who robbed the post office disguised in burqas… The mental capers sparked by these discussions exceed the imaginable. The Austrian Post’s mascot fox says speaks as he pleases. Alois Brandstetter is still an unrivaled master of words, presenting us with a whirlwind of subjects and anecdotes.

A century, a family, a marriage. And nothing more than lies.

When Henriette Stanley dies, the family standing at her grave is no longer large: There is Harry, her “mentally disturbed” son, on whom the shipowner family from Antwerp had once placed all their hopes. There is her daughter Ann with her German husband, whose marriage Henriette was unable to prevent even though it cost her Belgian inheritance after the War. And then there is the sister of her husband, who disappeared under suspicious circumstances many years before. Nobody speaks to her, even though she is the only one to know what happened to her brother and what the Antwerpian will really said. And she also knows that every attempt to forget is futile. This novel is a magnificent painting and Evelyn Gill proves her mastery with it. She recounts the story of a marriage, a novel about a family full of cracks, which reveal the chasms of an entire century.

The readers’ edition of Fritz von Herzmanovsky’s main work.

A dream path behind a cabinet door leads the unmarried orphan Cyriak de Pizzicolli, who has never traveled beyond Graz and its vicinity, to “Tarockei”, the “only neighboring country to the world”. The fantastical land inhabited by magical beings is an Austrian-Byzantine utopia, where the constitution is based on the card game tarot. What adventures he experiences after encountering the breathtakingly beautiful Cyparis and why he ends up wearing stag antlers on his head can be told by none less than Fritz Herzmanovsky-Orlando. “Masquerade of the Genii” is not only his main work, but also one of the main works of 20th century Austrian literature – the fantastical sister of Robert Musil’s “Man Without Qualities”, like Alice in Wonderland stumbling into Kafka’s Castle, a wonderful nightmare bubbling with ideas and humor!

Wie Thomas Bernhard Thomas Bernhard wurde

The causes were catastrophic: the boarding school was a prison, the town a terminal disease. There was war and there was his grandfather, who only talked to him about the masters, Mozart, Rembrandt and Beethoven. The causes were destructive, and they left indelible traces in Thomas Bernhard’s life and work.

Lehrjahre unter Erniedrigten

One morning, the pupil decides to withdraw from his life. In the cellar, on the fringes of the detested town, in the ghetto of the have-nots and criminals, Thomas Bernhard finds himself an apprenticeship in a grocery store. There he gets to know those who have been cast aside by society, and he gets to understand himself.