Lois is a nurse, undoubtedly a profession with a reasonable amount of decency. He truly knows how it feels to be entrusted to people who only want the best for you: a childhood in an orphanage, over the hills and far away, is also far away from a fairy tale. As an adult, the world still does not feel like home to him, and neither does Vienna: hairy monsters stroll along Mariahilferstraße, ants are building a mega city under ground, and the city is sitting above it like a sleeping giant. His neighbour Kristina, on her part, has ambitions: private ones that include Lois, professional ones that include pathology. One day, Lois discovers migratory locusts on his windowsill, tiny and fragile monsters that the wind had taken far, far away. Just like Lois himself. Yet flying does not make you an angel, let alone Superman… In his second novel, Michael Stavaric portraits another peculiar character facing an eerie world, and, to quote critics of his debut novel stillborn, he does it “brilliantly”, “masterly”, “linguistically overwhelming”.

Two people make a pair, or a couple, and their relationships can be ruins, arenas, traps, abysses, fulfilment. Coincidence, desire, and life itself create amazing couples: A little girl and her imaginary father make a fantastic pair of liars; a young woman teams up with her unborn child against its father who is interested in his art only; a prisoner and his visitor share intense memories through the glass that separates them. These are some of the encounters Erika Pluhar describes in this book. All of them reveal the magic that arises in any relationship between two people, be they just acquaintances or lovers, a powerful and fascinating energy that inevitably shows its effect on everyone involved. The stories tell how people change whenever they cling to each other, find each other, lose themselves in each other – whenever they meet, touch or find the magic of being twosome.

It must have been an irresistible joy for Günter Brus to invent these “stories”, and they definitely make an irresistible read. The book contains a collection of legends, anecdotes, fables, parables, or “bonsai novelettes”, as Brus himself called them with a twinkle in his eye. Whatever you call them, they burst with inventiveness and ignite the firework of a literary pyromaniac.

press commentary Günter Brus writing goes beyond genre borders (…) protocol, drama, vision and travelogue overlap and alternate in a playful way. With „Sharing the Secret“, artistic energy is turned into fantastic weightlessness. – Salzburger Nachrichten ...a novel of a rare kind. Strangely archaic, it yet bursts all contemporary borders of preconceived opinion. The caleidoscope starts turning after the first few pages, and in its whirling multitude, the reader is hit by cascades of imagery and ideas.– Die Presse Like an automatic writing, bizarre neologisms and somersaulting thoughts lead into a more and more meaningless nowhere (…) Games of any kind find their meaning in themselves. The authors jests are an explosion of dream vision and colour. – Neue Zürcher Zeitung

A group of men and women sets off to a country without name, and their adventures are recounted, told, or, in other words, dreamed up in this book.

„Weil du, mein Um und Auf, für mich, deinem Ab und Zu, unsterblich bist.“

Vieles, an dem der Dichter als Einzelgänger achtlos vorüberginge, rührt ihn ans Herz, wenn er denkt: Schade, dass ich zu ihr, der ja jetzt nur in meinen Gedanken Anwesenden, nicht „Schau!“ sagen kann. So trägt er das Gesehene und Erlebte im Kopf nach Hause, denn es wird ihr auch als ein von ihm Beschriebenes gefallen. Julian Schutting führt Spielarten einer Seelenliebschaft vor, eines luftigen, aber mit starken Fäden ausgestatteten Gespinsts, belebt von einem Hauch von Sinnlichkeit, der die gemeinsam betrachteten Dinge in ein neues Licht taucht; einer frei schwebenden Zusammengehörigkeit, die sich auch in Unterhaltungen über Dinge des Alltags ausdrückt, in heiteren Wechselreden, einem scherzhaft-fiktiven Frage-und-Antwort-Spiel. Ein halb vollkommenes Glück, das aber vielleicht nur ein geborgtes ist: „bis zu unserem ersten Tag hab ich an ein leichtes Dahingehen geglaubt. aber von dem an weiß ich, du wirst mir eine Abschiedserschwernis sein: mein Ein und Alles in dir zurückzulassen!“

Bulgarien kommt, der ultimative Roman dazu ist schon da. Und: Er ist saukomisch.

Bulgaria? Backward, corrupt and lazy? As the new ambassador in London, Varadin Dimitrov, is designated to enhance the image of Bulgaria in the West. When he rings the bell at the respectable address of the embassy in Kensington one morning, he finds that there is indeed a lot of work ahead of him: a provincial mayor at hangover breakfast, the cook at loggerheads with his wife, the vacuum cleaner – broken. Indeed, the civilized world owes thanks to Bulgaria for the invention of the water closet, but that does not help the new ambassador on his mission, nor does the fact that his predecessor refuses to clear the house as he is desperately fighting his return home. And above all: the freezer in the cellar houses ducks kidnapped by the Russian Mafia. Mission impossible? Varadin Dimitrov seeks assistance with a PR-Agency that promises him access to London's high society – glitter, glamour and dozens of celebrities. One of them is his cleaning lady; she leads a double life and moreover she's been dead for the longest time. There's something terribly wrong here, isn't it …. Alek Popov tells of the East in the West and the West in the East. In this novel full of wonderful characters he tells a story of pure folly, sounding as if all of this were not in the least bit funny. English translation available

Die Geschichte einer slowakischen Familie als Paradigma eines Lebens in der Heimatlosigkeit.

At seventeen, daughters never have an easy time with their mothers: The leech is always too short and in Czechoslovakia it must be still a bit shorter. When people say "a chip off the old block" mothers are usually more pleased than daughters. Jasmine Bukovská does not give her mom any reason for such a pleasure as she resembles her aunt: the woman whom her father loved and still loves. Marriage was thwarted by family reason. Then came Róza, the younger sister, satisfied her curiosity about life with the would-be brother-in-law, got pregnant and could be married. Three daughters sprang from this marriage: Iris, Jasmine and Kamilla. Life gets cramped at home as well as in the entire country. Spring in the year 1968 is the time of the great departure: Iris, the elder sister takes advantage of a gap in the Iron Curtain and emigrates to the United States of America, and also for Jasmine the temptation of leaving home and her home country behind grows …. Zdenka Becker is at home between two countries and in two languages. In a questioning tone, but without vain over-verbalization she tells of the loss of old commitments and the search for a new identity.

Die letzten Tage der Menschheit finden ihre Fortsetzung in einem Roman von beklemmender Kühnheit.

Carried off to Europe as a slave, a souvenir of an Africa expedition Gatterbauertwo is second footman to his master Alois Gatterbauer and looking for his home Uganda. After a time of meandering and after many detours he ends up in Hungary, goes to the dogs, and at the home of Count Pallavicini he is to be turned into a cultivated, converted catholic butler. He learns quickly: manners, waiting, German – but most of all he learns to hate. When heir apparent Franz Ferdinand is killed in Serbia and World War I breaks loose he is well prepared for his new role: He goes to war – for a strange emperor, a strange god, and a country that is not his. How can you survive Europe, the wild continent, the permanent war in the heart of darkness? And what does humanity mean, when man is nothing more than a cue ball of foreign powers – slave, soldier, object to look on, object of lust, a commodity? Based on meticulously researched historic material Max Blaeulich draws the picture of a society degenerated to the core: Europe, a culture where moral values have been perverted by racist arrogance and greed; Europe, gloriously stumbling across dead bodies from one catastrophe into the next. The quote from Dostoevsky tunes in for a grotesque pitch. Blaeulich is a master of this field, and he is in good company: Gogol, Canetti, Gombrowicz, Carlo Emilio Gadda, Sergio Pitol, just to name a few. The genre of the grotesque itself is a blossom of baroque art. Blaeulich is a baroque author not only because of his characterisations, but also because of his roaming, straying, slope-searching way of storytelling. LEOPOLD FÖDERMAIER, NZZ

28 Porträts von Frauen, die in Dietmar Griesers Leben auf diese oder jene Weise eine Rolle gespielt haben.

They flock his book launch presentations. At his lectures they stand in line for getting dedications and personalized autographs. And when they have finished reading his latest book they write him letters. Yes, women love him – and he loves them in return. But who are those others, whom Dietmar Grieser renders homage to when he is to himself, aside from his professional life. In twenty-eight sometimes very personal portraits he makes them take curtain calls: women who in certain phases of his life have meant a lot to him, have left a very special impression on him, perhaps have shaped him, in any case women who have secured themselves a permanent place in Dietmar Grieser’s memory. Women, whom he met personally and who have accompanied him for some time on the paths that led him through life, find themselves next to others, whose fate has won him over. And yet others whose picture he “only” got to know in literature, in music, in pieces of the Fine Arts or on film screens. Dietmar Grieser, the literary investigator: the man who found the bestseller gene. News

Wie seinerzeit Marlen Haushofer verdient es Hannelore Valencak von einer neuen Generation gelesen zu werden.

Ursula has both feet firmly on the ground: She’s young, in love, just happily married and together with her husband Joachim she has just renovated a little house and is looking forward to the first vacation together. But when she wakes up the morning before their holiday Joachim has disappeared, she is no longer at her house, and there are frost patterns on her window which she finds quite unusual for it being in the middle of July: Mysteriously she finds herself thrown back into the past, into the apartment of her overbearing aunt Priska, the gray everyday life awaiting her at the office – a life that marriage had just released her from. In vain she tries to expedite the course of events and to reach her husband who does not know anything about her yet until she realizes that she has to go the same path as unchanged as possible. But will everything fit together in the end, so that the encounter that made her life take such a lucky turn will actually take place again? Or will what at first seemed like a mean set-back in reality turn out to be a second chance? Like Marlen Haushofer, Hannelore Valencak deserves to be read by a new Generation. “Summer Window” was first published in 1967 under the title “Zuflucht