The loved one, the brother, the friend – three intense relationships, three farewells. Farewells that stand for liberation and restart at the same time.

What remains from a great love? How do we observe its end? Three removal boxes mark the point at which two people abruptly drift apart. One train ticket away from each other. The way the first-person narrator once started to love Srećko she also stops – at least for the moment. Or: How do we look back on a difficult past without deep hurt? Beograd, the white city, provides refuge and leads into a space without memories in which the puppeteer can reinvent her own history. In front of the bullet holes of a forgetful city. Or: What distinguishes love from friendship? Rita is on her way to America and Paul gazes for a whole night over the ocean that separates them. The next morning he will call Maria and – maybe – find a new present. Profoundly and seriously Milena Michiko Flašar tells from narrow relationships and being in search for oneself. Her prose stands out by the maelstrom of its language. It leads us into a world full of visible and invisible signs. An exciting debut.

“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.

Two sisters and their good-bye of a mother who eludes her children and their demands until the end of her life.

Xenia is a painter. When she gets a scholarship and is invited to Rome, she sees her chance to no longer live in the shadow as an artist. Xenia has just arrived in Rome when she receives a call by her sister from her homeland: Their mother, a famous writer, has collapsed at a lecture and is in a coma. The mother for whom her own prestige has always been more important than her family, her art more important than her children: Because of her Xenia shall travel back, turn down the chance to assert herself – not least towards the mother? The mother’s silence and death and her own distance force Xenia to grapple with her childhood, with her mother’s egoism and not least with her own art – the egoism of the daughter. Xenia stays: because of her mother who is unreachable for her approaches, and because of Alma, the photographer, who disappears in a mysterious way; also she, without saying good-bye. Evelyn Grill is unmistakable: sober-minded, lapidary, without sentimentality. Evelyn Grill is endowed with the ability to draft lives with all their inherent ambivalence. (...) Beyond the fascination (...) terrifying biographies appear that are revealed with masterful precision by the narrow novel. Alongside the row of memorable characters (...) Evelyn Grill designs a Rome that sparkles with life and art (...). FAZ, Andreas Platthaus Even though it is more psychological than her last novels, "The Roman Light" is still typical of Grill: Clear language is combined with complex construction; the motives are artfully interwoven, and, likewise, ironically undermined. FALTER, Kirstin Breitenfellner

The story doesn’t get rid of its monsters. The story of a man who tries to messure the value of life, and masses die.

Hitler is in power, but not yet in his homeland. There, people are waiting to “come home” to the empire, some full of hope, some full of fear. Stackler is nobody who likes to wait, and above all he doesn’t know fear. The “illegal” Nazi gets prepared for his time of glory: Stackler, in the position of the head of the institute for racial research, wants to create the new man, wants to care for pure blood at university, to wipe out. The fact that “Miss March”, who doesn’t only assist him in scientific concerns, makes him a father of an illegitimate child is thereby very inconvenient. But what for does somebody like Stackler know the value of life... “May I introduce myself, Professor Stackler, physiologist.” A person who introduces himself in such a dynamic and snappy way knows before all the others what’s happening, and he goose-steps ahead: up the job ladder, from one empire to the next, from one republic to the next and always sticking at nothing. In the heart of the heart of the darkness: Max Blaeulich completes his trilogy about the wild Europe – an opus that can’t be compared to anything in German literature: pitiless, keen, radical.

Uwe Dick wurde 2007 mit dem Jean-Paul-Preis ausgezeichnet!

“Where people are singing, you can come to a rest” an old saying goes. Uwe Dick confirms the saying, but advices to have a look on the lyrics as well. Sauwaldprosa is full of suprises, delight in thinking and subtile art of language. Uwe Dick’s Sauwaldprosa contiues to take us along new paths. His horizontal survey at the same time plunges into the depths. Uwe Dick will someday have completed his Ulysses. James Joyce’s dark tower of fire does share common ground with Uwe Dick’s secretive and uncanny Sauwald. (Süddeutsche Zeitung). Sauwaldprosa was published first in1976, thereafter in expanded versions in 1978, 1981, 1987 and 2001.

Wie groß ist eine kleine Welt?

Die Liegestatt ist Anker wie Angelpunkt einer Reise ohne Anfang und ohne Ziel. Ohne sich zu bewegen, nimmt der Text Fahrt auf, kommt von einem Ort zum anderen Ort und sammelt auf seinem Weg Strandgut auf: ein Wasserkocher, das Bohrgeräusch im oberen Stockwerk, ein Tretroller, die zerquetschte Wespe zwischen den Jalousienblättern. Beobachtungen und Erinnerungsbilder aus einer Welt der kleinen Dinge und Sensationen, die zu Wörtern gerinnen. Wörter wiederum, die Beobachtungen und Erinnerungsbilder hervorrufen, aus denen sich eine Welt zusammensetzt: „Noch mehr zu verhandeln, noch mehr Segelboote, die aufzutakeln sind.“ Hans Eichhorn schreibt mit „Die Liegestatt“ das Logbuch einer Expedition im Stillstand, in der Bewegungslosigkeit. Die Seekarte ist der geweißte Plafond über dem Ich, das im Liegen sich und die Welt vermisst. Vermisst, im doppelten Sinne: Denn die Welt ist immer der andere Ort, wo man gerade nicht ist, „und sobald du hineingreifst, zerplatzt das Gebilde“. So steht diese Reise wie jede andere unter dem Motto: „Trag bitte die Altkleider in den Keller und bring die fertig geschleuderte Kochwäsche zum Aufhängen mit!“

Unscramble the code! Alois Brandstetter investigates in the secret world of graffiti. “Korks” says the writing on the wall, over there, and there again, and there and there... Is it a code? A message? Or just a signature? Like a detective, Alois Brandstetter starts to track down meaning and origin of the graffito and adds his philosophic thoughts on manifestations of youth culture, resistance or simply the sweetness of forbidden fruit. But what is the motivation behind these markings? Starting from Josef Kyselak, the Austrian ancestral graffiti writer who even left his mark on the emperor’s desk, Brandstetter describes his personal struggle with the adversities of life. And there are reasons abound for irritation: from compulsory wearing of helmets to higher speed limits, from social injustice to the alleged right on individual freedom, from Günter Grass to... While chasing “Korks”, Brandstetter draws an extensive picture of our society today. The world of graffiti artists, however, remains mysterious... An eloquent, funny and witty companion through the empire of the “unknown vandals”.

If I knew already, you would know. If you knew already, I wouldn’t need to tell you this story. Okay? Okay. So?

Take each day as it comes, avoid stereotypes, be free! This is exactly what a young couple plan to do when they move into an apartment building together. The other residents are involved in their own lives, but seem to be interwoven with each other in a mysterious way. For example, childless paediatrician Conny with her long-distance relationship, inscrutable cellist Jeff, ageing teacher Ms Baumgartner, and then there is Agnes. An intense relationship develops between Agnes and the narrator, a relationship of attraction and repulsion. But suddenly something happens; on New Year's Eve Agnes dies. And nothing is as it was before. The tenants disperse and go their own ways and the young woman starts out on a journey. A search begins for life, identity and “home”. It will continue for many years. Monique Schwitter’s exceptional literary talent blossoms to the full in her first novel. Although the author refuses to provide a psychological analysis, she still manages to penetrate intensely into the strange world of the protagonists. Tragic, funny and unsettling!

O.P. Zier weckt einmal mehr die schlafenden Hunde der Provinz. Die Macht, ihre Marionetten und ein Mord - und alles spricht gegen den Erzähler.

The idyll is elsewhere... Once again, O.P. Zier is not willing to let sleeping dogs lie. A story of the powerful, their puppets and a murder – and all evidence is against the narrator... Barbara Lochner is dead, but who killed her? Everything speaks against Werner Burger, the narrator, except the characters in his book, who line up to admit freely how much each of them would like to kill Barbara Lochner. But when the murder happened, Burger was the only one at the crime scene to confront her with the criminal manipulations of a bureaucracy corrupted by politics. One of her victims is Erwin Lang, an upright man who thought he was about to trace conspiratorial activities but then finds himself in the nuthouse. Or did he just fall prey to his own mind? Against his will, Burger becomes Lang’s advocate in his fight against “the secret system”, and is soon confronted with some crazy small-town dignitaries who aim to reinvent the seasons... This novel takes place on the shady side of an alpine holiday region, in the dreariness between peak season and peak season. Scrutinizing and unrelenting like a detective, O.P. Zier illuminates all corners on which the flashing cameras have not yet shed their light. The result is not only a thrilling story, but also a novel on the pitfalls of story-telling and an author who is always offender and victim at the same time.

Scoglio Pomo, a small and rocky island in the Adriatic Sea, would have remained undiscovered if things had turned out right. They have not, however, and so Scoglio Pomo serves as a glamorous getaway for a group of exiles from a battered Austro-Hungarian Empire. Things go all haywire in this pompous Atlantis of Austrianisms: the decadent, goofy noble men and their insatiable ladies cultivate their spleens and whims, they dance on ghost ships until the magic is lost and they find themselves in the water. But only when the British Fleet by mistake reduces the island to rubble and ruins the Emperor’s Viennese Breakfast, it becomes clear that the golden era of Scoglio Pomo and its quirky inhabitants is over. Scoglio Pomo is an island full of fantastic stories and lovely, cranky originals – monuments of an elegant, yet doomed and tattered world. Fritz von Herzmanovsky-Orlando is a master of the grotesque and one of the great representatives of Austro-Hungarian world literature. This is the first single volume edition of “Scoglio Pomo”, which remained unpublished in Herzmanovsky-Orlando’s lifetime. It is unabridged, unmodified, richly illustrated and the first of four volumes of his most important works.