Stories of a house: about life under one roof, between walls and doors. And love comes and goes like its residents.

Just look at Konrad, the architect. When he and Dora moved into the house, she was expecting; eleven years later she has left him together with their daughter Katharina. At 16, Katharina moves in again, and Konrad fills the fridge for her. And he brings out a model of his dream house, built in his lonesome years. Konrad doesn’t see that his daughter is disappearing in front of his eyes because she stopped eating. He also doesn’t see Marie, the doctor living downstairs, who falls in love with him and finds Katharina after her breakdown. This story and all the others in this book open on two sides, just like doors leading from one room to another. Gudrun Seidenauer opens the doors to a whole universe within confined spaces, merging past and present. In brilliant style and with a keen sense for the psychology of humans, she tells the stories a house would tell if it were more than a silent witness.

Master of marvelling, failure in believing: on being an anachronistic contemporary.

“I was a master of marvelling and a failure in believing,” Amanshauser once wrote on himself. In this attitude, open-minded and extremely sceptical at the same time, he spent decades in his lookout high up on Salzburg’s Festungsberg hill. Secluded, but not isolated; withdrawn, but not indifferent. With ingenuity and acuity, a playful humour and unapologetic seriousness he defended his convictions - against all forms of dogmatism, banality and megalomania. All his books tell this story; most of all, however, do his diaries - a seleciton of them is now published for the first time. The observations and self-reflections in this book, alert, irritated, brilliant, scornful, dreamy and relentless to the point where Parkinson’s disease began its work of destruction, remind the reader how much Gerhard Amanshauser is missing in our time.

Ein Thema, drei Blickwinkel: Wovon Poeten, Twitterer und Schluckspechte reden, wenn es ums Zwitschern geht.

The whole world is buzzing and tweeting, in one way or the other, and this is what this book is about. Franz Schuh, a masterful essayist, looks deeper into the existence of boozers and their veering between the utopia of autonomy and the reality of dependency, proofing that suffering and depravation have a great say in who or what humans are. And if Twitter really played a crucial role in the Arab Spring uprisings, there must be more to it than empty tweeting, right? asks Kathrin Passig. And finally, the question on the links between poetry and birds’ twittering is answered by a double expert: Helwig Brunner is both one of the most important young poets in the German-speaking world and a keen ornithologist.

Of saintly and unsaintly people, martyrs and spies: a different history of Iran.

Iran is an unpredictable country. Everything seems impenetrable, nebulous and threatening. In an attempt to bring light into the darkness, Ulrich Ladurner scouted Azari Square in the capital city of Tehran and collected the stories of its citizens. There’s Amit who becomes a saint (which also makes for good business), Baba Zede who notices every single hypocritical move of his neighbours, and then there’s beautiful Robabe who makes a significant decision. Ladurner tells how people suffered under the rule of the Shah, how they experienced the Islamic Revolution and how they are living today, on the verge of a new war. He intertwines historic facts and stories from everyday life in Iran, thus giving a valuable insight, story by story.

Austrian contemporary literature from Christoph Ransmayr to Robert Menasse in exemplary interpretations of their most important works.

Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler coined the term Bruchlinien (faultlines) to describe all the shifts and faults in Austrian literature after World War II. This anthology of all his legendary lectures on the topic has become a standard reference long ago. It also shows how exciting, vivid, inspirational and enthusiastic talks and thoughts on literature can be. Schmidt-Dengler observed and followed contemporary literature in Austria to the last, not only as a critic, but also in these previously unpublished lectures in which he examined the evolutions in Austrian literature from 1990 to 2008 from both a critical distance and a compassionate closeness.