Those who want to understand the 60’s, have to understand Woodstock. This is the book about the legend, written by one of Germany’s best music editors.

“3 days of peace and music” it said on a red poster with a dove of peace painted on a stylized guitar. The newspaper advertisement that was placed all over the country at the same time was even more specific: “Just walk around for three days, without seeing skyscrapers or trafficlights. Let your kite fly, lie down in the sun. Prepare your meal on your own and breathe fresh air.” And the music: With Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, The Who, Joan Baez and many others, this “Aquarian Exposition” was well-cast. And so it happened that on August 15th 1969 there were 400.000 to 500.000 people setting off to the Catskill Mountains. Traffic came to a standstill, the supply situation was awful, there was nothing, except for dope. New York’s Governor threatened to declare a state of emergency, the whole world was expecting a catastrophe. The hippie’s dream of love, peace, fraternity, ecstasy and transcendency came true for three whole days. There the counterculture had its last great celebration, in the face of Vietnam. Woodstock is the hippie movement’s legendary culmination and at the same time its geatest possible gathering.

The story of two women, mother and daughter, who share their past, but who are not able to share their memories.

“Hermann is dead, now I can remember precisely.” The husband of Marianne fell down the stairs and broke his neck – an accident. She knows exactly when it happened: She wrote it down on a piece of paper in order not to forget, not like she uses to forget lunch sometimes or her neighbor’s name or her pills. Marianne suffers from Alzheimer; she is losing her memories, now she has lost her husband, too. “She’s crying ‘cause she knows that it’s too late, although he’s dead.” An accident? Friederike, Marianne’s daughter, has her doubts. Did her mother have to become a murderer to break free? While Friederike finds herself forced by her father’s death to take care for her mother, the latter withdraws herself bit by bit: she withdraws into her past, into a time when she was only a child, when she did not need bags and notes to prevent herself from forgetting. “Unraveled Days” is Gudrun Seidenauer’s second novel: cautious, touching and full of empathy, nevertheless not at the expense of the author’s linguistic accuracy.

SHORTLIST Deutscher Buchpreis 2009 Bremer Literaturpreis 2009 Walter and Alexander used to be friends when they were only children – now their ways meet again.

This is the story of Walter, the son of an influential architect. He wants to become an actor – or is that what his father wants? Walter is given a chance when Valerie, an exhausted psychiatrist, askes him to play the parts of fictitious patients’ roles in group therapy sessions. Only he is too much absorbed in his part. This is the story of Alexander. He is a nurse, a young man of spreading imagination, which developed in the shadows of his lonely childhood. Alexander quits his job and tries to get rid of his girlfriend in order to be with Valerie. But one day she is found being beaten up brutally… After his debut “Sons and Planets”, for which he received nothing but approval from the critics, Clemens J. Setz presents a piece of work which exceeds all expectations: breathtakingly vigorous, colourful, of powerful expressions and yet gentle.

Is the capital exhausting its own descendants? Where does economy navigate to and how can we change the heading?

Recent developments in economy make it clear: Farreaching changes in the neoliberal system are in process. So immensely farreaching that even the most dedicated supporters of the free market economy call the state to help and realize that their strategies have to be reconsidered. But not only did speculations on the stockmarket and fraud undermine neoliberalism. The causes for this crisis are rooted far deeper and the crucial question is this: What has to be changed in our economy and system of values to regain economical stability? Not only government support, but also the demand for transparency, for planning on a longterm basis and for accepting responsibility for our future have to be discussed, as well as a mechanism that does not load the taxpayer with the costs for imprudence and short-sightedness, but those who caused them. Klaus Woltron gave a well funded response to the financial crisis and suggests humane solutions: Because what economy needs are ethics and longterm thinking.

A freethinker’s philosophical and smart manifest.

Buddha went to the woods, Jesus to the desert and Mohammed crouched down in a cave in order to carve a name to themselves. So, what does Adolf Holl do? At the hair dresser’s he links philosophy and literature with spiritual intellectual history only to find his way back to a profane lifestyle. With “How To Found A Religion” the freethinker Adolf Holl drew up a manifesto. An essential, profound and affectionate one. Intending to found a religion, Holl takes a wander through the history of religions, asking “why” – why a profession of faith? The present day has sent the founders of our religions back to the desert and now a solution it is, what we need: a new religion! Adolf Holl asks questions and searches for the answers. Only one thing he is sure of: The suitable religion is still to be found. Ironically, funny as well as rich in content he describes his longing for a denomination that works and thus can be lived.

A slovakian elderly care nurse’s death and a story about the new Europe and its old boarders. \"I think that one can not let this horrifying story rest, and I am sure that others feel the same as I do.\" Elfriede Jelinek

“Everything started when I, an Austrian living in Slovakia, read about a Slovak who had been found dead in on of Austria’s rivers - naked.” The last time Denisa Soltísová was seen alive, she was wandering around in an austrian city; it was January the 19th 2008, at night , only wearing underwear. Days after this incident she was found – dead and naked. The 29-year-old woman was a collegegraduate, Slovak and worked round-the-clock as a elderly care nurse. The police closed the case: “Suicide”. Yet the autopsy, performed in Slovakia, showed traces of violence. It is 700 kilometres from Ratkovská Lehota, where Desisa lived, to the place she died. Two different worlds that are parted by 700 kilometres, linked only by commuting busses, full of nurses. Two different worlds in which Martin Leidenfrost tracked the traces of one of them who will never return to the other side of the borders.

She’s forever searching, lands everywhere but never really gets anywhere. She lives in Boboville.

She is one of those people her parents always warned her about. One of those first-person narrators who suffer from a crave for stories, a crave for thingy-stories, idea-stories. Completely bonkers. She hangs around bars, flows through lounges, shakes on dance floors. And, like everybody else in Boboville, she’s always searching – for the Explorer guitar, for the pasty-faced guy with love handles, for the story of Hiram Abiff, that special Zappa bootleg. She is searching for Anouk Aimée in 8 ½, the Freitag bag with the B in chartreuse, Coop’s devil’s face, the four daiquiris at Floridita’s, burning Elmar. Like all the others, she lives in the town of towns. She lives in Boboville. In this postmodern city novel, we accompany the protagonist on her daily odyssey. The author recounts the ludicrous episodes in the lives of the bobo (bourgeouis bohemian) people. Meet the hippie baker with LSD-coloured hair, the poet with the sharp knife, the chancelor, and the climber. They all land everywhere, but never get anywhere. They are already there. In Boboville.

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).