Motherhood’s hell, love’s death: a requiem for those who have grazed their knees due to euphoria.

She came because of Ivan, it is him she is here for. Ivan is her home, the place of her wishes and all her longings, the place where true love is to be found.However, when she gets pregnant, one baby, then the third one, it is Ivan who traits their idea. Love turns into obsession, drowning in excesses of violence. This betrayal breathes vengeance, as passionate as love, as brutal as desire. “I am their mother. I gave birth to them. I can do whatever I like to do with them.” Michaela Falkner tells the story about a love dying, dramatic like a Greek Tragedy. At the same time she reveals the horror and cruelty of a daily life ruled by domestic violence. The author bears a lot of courage in order to write with the icy pathos of fragility and cruelty.

Being on the way – the ultimate litany

"I am an explorer without mission, withous specialty and without destination." Two month, which Blixa Bargeld predominantly spends in a bus - from Lisbon to Moscow, Oslo to Naples, crisscrossing Europe. Free day on a tour means a day for travelling. And what does Blixa Bargeld do? He visits a museum, buys shoes and wines and dines alone (mostly), but not only this ... A tournee, a litany and a declaration of love to Europe.

Thomas Bernhard's memoirs of his youth - consisting of five volumes "Die Ursache" (1975), "Der Keller" (1976)," Der Atem" (1978), "Die Kälte" (1981), "Ein Kind" (1982) - contain central motifs of his novels, as well as the origins of the hurts he endured. His childhood, his schooldays as a boarder in Salzburg, his apprenticeship and student days, and his isolation at the age of eighteen in a sanatorium. Anyone wishing to understand Bernhard's world will find the key here. The sister comes in, grabs the washing, and throws it onto a chair beside the bath. Then she lifts my hand. All night she calls at various rooms, lifting people’s hands and feeling their pulses. She starts stripping the bed, the bed in which someone has just died. She throws the covers on the floor and then lifts my hand again, as though waiting for me to die. Then she bends down, gathers up other covers, and goes out with them. Now I want to live. (From: In the Cold) The autobiography is Thomas Bernhard's richest and most mature work. It is one of the great literary documents of our '70s. (Marcel Reich-Ranicki, FAZ)

Walter Kappacher received the Georg Büchner Prize 2009! 10 days in the life of Hugo von Hofmannsthal: an ageing author returns to the place of his childhood.

August 1924: It is rather embarrassment why the elderly writer H. returns to a place from his childhood – Fusch, a spa in the midst of Salzburg’s mountains where he had spent summer after summer with his parents when he was growing up. A lot has changed in the meanwhile: friendships have grown apart, his fame dates back several years and his work is endangered by his impaired health and the slightest disturbances. The change of time after the war has found its way even into the life in remote Fusch and H., who became a stranger to himself, participates only in observing. During a walk H. becomes unconscious. Awaking, he gets to know young Doctor Krakauer, a duchess’ physician in private practice. He too is a repatriate in a foreign world. H. seeks to gain his friendship, but still there is the duchess and still there is a loneliness he cannot escape from. Walter Kappacher tells from a life, which has been overtaken by the time. He tells with captivating intensity and with lucid empathy, as competent as virtuosic. He confirms his special position in the german-speaking literature: “a rare one” (Peter Handke).

Erika Pluhar describes a man’s journey into finding himself.

Emil Windhacker is a man in the prime of life. Career oriented, sporty, always in good company, he enjoys his life to the full. But a medical test result and a feeling of weakness and failure that is new to him get him thinking. Is this diagnosis his death sentence? When Emil meets actress Marie Liebner, events follow in rapid succession … Erika Pluhar describes three days in the life of a man. From Emil's subjective perspective, Pluhar draws an accurate picture of the male view on Life’s major themes of love, illness and death. Pluhar’s tale of eventual self-discovery is poetic, humorous, tightly narrated and deeply moving.

Die Neuauflage der beliebten Winter- und Weihnachtsgeschichten. Das Kultbuch für alle Brandstetter-Fans.

»Alle Jahre wieder …«, so beginnt eines unserer geläufigsten Weihnachtslieder, und es liegt gewiß etwas Beruhigendes in dieser gleichbleibenden Wiederkehr. Und doch ist kein Jahr wie das andere, und wenn die Adventszeit naht, wenn es draußen kalt und in der Stube geheizt ist, dann rückt man wohl so manches Mal mit der Familie und guten Freunden zusammen und erinnert sich gegenseitig an Geschichten und Begebenheiten. Sie liegen vielleicht schon lang zurück, aber sind im Gedächtnis geblieben, weil sie für die Erwachsenen etwas Besonderes oder für die Kinder etwas Neues waren. Da mischt sich dann oft Behagliches mit Bewahrtem. Solcherart sind auch die Geschichten, die Alois Brandstetter in diesem Buch erzählt. Es sind Erinnerungen an die Winter und Weihnachtsfeste seiner Jugend, die er in dem kleinen Ort Pichl in Oberösterreich verbracht hat in den Jahren nach dem großen Krieg und der bösen Herrschaft. Aber ob Brandstetter vom Eisstockschießen, vom Sternsingen oder von frühen Skiversuchen berichtet, vom ersten Radioapparat oder von einer großen Überschwemmung, er tut es erfrischend unsentimental und immer detailfreudig und genau. Wenn volkstümliche Erzählliteratur über Weihnachten heute noch möglich ist, dann so.

Warum gehen alle Schiffe irgendwann unter? Warum geht immer alles schief? Und warum hat einer, den kein Schwein kennt, überall seine Finger im Spiel?

Why do all boats founder at a certain point? Why does everything go wrong? And why does somebody whom not a soul knows have everywhere a finger in the pie? This pet shop keeper, the guy from next door: He is everywhere and nowhere at home, lives with a golden hamster (thus almost alone), is inconspicuous like a turtle and keeps aloof from people. He only gets in touch with water on and off, then there is a lot of action: assassinations, natural disasters, und permanently there are boats foundering somewhere. Small ones, big ones, the Titanic, with all hands. And always there is our pet shop keeper involved, has above all always already been there and knows too much. A person who doesn’t think of anything evil (of course!), but is he therefore one of us? Or maybe rather God and the devil and everybody’s fate? Michael Stavaric is surfing through the centuries, back and forth, is landing in other eras and is in one phrase back in the present. He brings us news, comfort and warning: universal flux, even the stones, but also the devil never sleeps. History for Michael Stavaric consists of stories, but thousands of them – ones that you haven’t yet heard that way. This is about everything, from the very beginning... until the end, that won’t be a happy one, but neither a bitter one.

The ideal introduction into the wonderful fantastical world of Fritz von Herzmanovsky-Orlando: short, quaint, classical, funny!

The world of Fritz von Herzmanovsky-Orlando is a cabinet of curiosities, a scrapbook of the strange, a sheet of pictures of the bizarre. It is populated by figures rather than by human beings – by exemplars, forms and spawns. What occurs to him is not necessarily unusual. What he describes is caricature. In fine, his world resembles a strange zoo: Come in, have a look! You will be surprised if you suddenly face yourself. Volume 2 of the “concentrated edition” contains a selection of narratives and short pieces of prose. Many of them belong to Herzmanovsky’s most popular works and have long been classics: “The commandant of Kalymnos”, “Apoll of Nothing”, “Uncle Toni’s muffed Christmas Eve”, “The Sausage Machine” and many more. Here you have the world of Herzmanovsky-Orlando on a small scale, a bird cage: Look forward to Father Kniakal, Cavaliere Huscher and Chinesius von Schluck!

Vom Hundeausführer zum Millionär, vom Millionär zum Aussteiger: Zwei Brüder aus Bulgarien suchen ihr Glück in Amerika und finden immerhin die Asche ihres Vaters.

From dog walker to millionaire, from millionaire to dropout: two brothers from Bulgaria seek their fortune in America and, at least, find their father's ashes. A small black box full of ashes is all that Ned and Ango, two very different brothers from Bulgaria, have left of their father. It has been 15 years since their father, a mathematician hovering between genius and madness, died under mysterious circumstances in America as a visiting professor. Meanwhile, both of the two sons lead their own lives and their father has long been nothing more than a ghost. Until the paths of the two brothers cross, far from their homeland, in New York. Ned, the good-for-nothing, has made it to the top on Wall Street while Ango, the smart one, walks dogs for snobs in Central Park. But then the tide turns and the ghost of their father suddenly comes to life once more. Or at least more than both of them are comfortable with… Alek Popov does away with old fairytales. His new novel was at number one for weeks in the bestseller lists in Bulgaria. It is a satire of gold diggers in the West and the East, of the yearning for happiness shared by successful people and underdogs, and of the wrong impressions we immediately form of each other when a world divides us. East or West, top or bottom, dead or alive: let us be brothers! Racy, witty and damned biting. Woof!

“As if the sea wanted to give birth to another sea.”

Eloquent and with fine irony Julian Schutting attends to the great topics of literature: What turns a poem into a poem, how to treat political topics without slipping into humanitarian banalities, and how to nowadays still write nature poems? “To the moon” is the exemplary summarisation of Schutting’s poetry. Against every prevailing trend he sings the praises of Orphelia’s waterbed, refers to Schiller’s Nenia and makes songs rush through raging seas. In refined compositions, Julian Schutting’s poems carry us away into a world that is in dept to Enlightenment, to sensuality and delight for language. This bow to poetry results on its part in great poetry, and to the one who gets into it, the power of the word opens up. But he isn’t too serious about it, and so one can allow to be fooled with pleasure.