Anton und Alma is a contemporary Berlin love story that gradually becomes a novel about Jewishness, German guilt, inherited trauma, family damage, conversion, antisemitism, the Israel–Gaza war, and the terrifying fact that private love is never protected from history. It follows Anton Weiss, a young Jewish German-American man from Berlin, and Alma Bormann, a non-Jewish […]
Clemens J. Setz’s Mein Leben als Noiseband is a collection about grief, fixation, distorted care, shame, online cruelty, damaged families, and the strange ways people try to make contact with others. The stories often begin in ordinary situations, then bend into obsession, fantasy, horror, or absurdity. “Das Lesebändchen in der U-Bahn” opens with a man […]
The Marianum in Vienna has been one of Austria’s elite boarding schools for as long as anyone can remember. Till Kokorda doesn’t expect much from the school when he starts fifth grade there, but he quickly learns how hard the school can be because of his form teacher, the so-called Dolinar. The Dolinar teaches German […]
This is a postmodern literary novel divided into thirteen numbered chapters, set in 1995 Switzerland. The book’s first-person narrator, called Christian Kracht like the author, is also the main character from Christian Kracht’s debut novel Faserland, and shares many of its topics: road trips, societal decay, Nazi Germany, drug addiction, death. The narrator here bears many similarities to the […]
The novel tells the story of the intense and complex relationship between Hans, a middle-aged novelist, and Katharina, a young woman in East Berlin during the late 1980s. Their relationship begins when they meet on a rainy day, leading to a passionate affair, despite the significant age difference and the fact that Hans is married […]
Martin is a 76-year-old man who learns that he has pancreatic cancer with less than six months to live. He struggles with the idea of telling his wife, Ulla, and their young son, David, about his terminal illness. As he contemplates how to break the news to his family, he reflects on his life, relationships, […]