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!

Das zentrale Bestreben der Moderne gilt der Vergrößerung der eigenen Reichweite, des Zugriffs auf die Welt: Diese verfügbare Welt ist jedoch, so Hartmut Rosas brisante These, eine verstummte, mit ihr gibt es keinen Dialog mehr. Gegen diese fortschreitende Entfremdung zwischen Mensch und Welt setzt Rosa die „Resonanz“, als klingende, unberechenbare Beziehung mit einer nicht-verfügbaren Welt. Zur Resonanz kommt es, wenn wir uns auf Fremdes, Irritierendes einlassen, auf all das, was sich außerhalb unserer kontrollierenden Reichweite befindet. Das Ergebnis dieses Prozesses lässt sich nicht vorhersagen oder planen, daher eignet dem Ereignis der Resonanz immer auch ein Moment der Unverfügbarkeit.

Do we dress as women or as men? Are our clothes simply a form of self-expression or are we also conveying a wealth of social codes? Fashion, according to Barbara Vinken, is always simultaneously a language, a set of conventions to which we are subject, and a means of defying those conventions – surrendering ourselves to the charms of dressing up. Only as a game played with gender, class and identity is fashion capable of performing gender as a sophisticated rhetorical construct. What fashion does, therefore, is not to erase gender, not to make gender fluid, but to radically unsettle and juxtapose the constructs of ‘femininity’ and ‘masculinity’. Provocative, witty and brilliant.