It all begins quite harmless: True Kakanian patriot Jaromir von Eynhuf decides to bestow the gift of his milk tooth collection on his beloved monarch on the occasion of the latter’s royal jubilee. As fate will have it, the collection is still incomplete. On his quest for the last milk tooth, the loyal official of the royal court’s drum depot bravely faces the trials and tribulations of Kakania. With his debut novel, Fritz Herzmanovsky-Orlando created an unforgettable literary monument to Imperial Austria and the Habsburg monarchy.

The world of Fritz von Herzmanovsky-Orlando is a cabinet of curiosities, a scrapbook of the strange, a sheet of pictures of the bizarre. It is populated by figures rather than by human beings – by exemplars, forms and spawns. What occurs to him is not necessarily unusual. What he describes is caricature. In fine, his world resembles a strange zoo: Come in, have a look! You will be surprised if you suddenly face yourself. Volume 2 of the “concentrated edition” contains a selection of narratives and short pieces of prose. Many of them belong to Herzmanovsky’s most popular works and have long been classics: “The commandant of Kalymnos”, “Apoll of Nothing”, “Uncle Toni’s muffed Christmas Eve”, “The Sausage Machine” and many more. Here you have the world of Herzmanovsky-Orlando on a small scale, a bird cage: Look forward to Father Kniakal, Cavaliere Huscher and Chinesius von Schluck!

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 This is the first single volume edition of “Scoglio Pomo”, which remained unpublished in Herzmanovsky-Orlando’s lifetime.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.

“As regards his will towards monomania, Gerhard Amanshauser cannot compare to his friend Thomas Bernhard. In terms of literary boldness, Thomas Bernhard cannot compare to Gerhard Amanshauser. Of all Austrian writers yet to be discovered, this cosmopolitan from Salzburg is the most important.” FALTER, Daniel Kehlmann “As Barbarian in the Prater” is more than the autobiography of its author born in 1928 in Salzburg. It is also an engaging novel about childhood and youth in Austria (1928-1950).

Josef Urban's one thought is to get away – so a car with the key left in the ignition offers the very chance. It is not his car, but this matters to him just as little as the fact that he has no driver's licence. He soon realises, however, that there is a girl asleep on the back seat. When she wakes up he tells her to get out, but she refuses. Maria, a schoolgirl, is the lover of the RI teacher to whom the car belongs. She is pregnant, and has little sympathy with the victim of the theft. She can understand Urban's escape attempt, however. The border is closer that they realise, and they suddenly find themselves in Italy. Josef is enjoying the trip and the company; but he cannot avoid feeling responsible for the girl – a thankless role, especially as it is hardly consistent with his love for the absurd. Nominated for the German Book Prize 2005 (Longlist)

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).