The real, the ultimate thing – this is something different to each of us. To Hans Frambach, it is the crimes of the Nazi era which have made him suffer as long as he can think. They are the reason why he became an archivist at the Institute for the Management of History in Berlin. He is wondering, however, if it was time for a change of profession. Bewilderment with the past is also what preoccupies his best friend, Graziela – until she meets a man, who desires her, and makes her recognise the carnal encounter of the sexes as the ultimate thing. A concept, however, she now starts to doubt. However, is it legitimate to hold National Socialism responsible for all of this? Isn't it rather their inability to be happy that makes Hans and Graziela such peculiar characters? They themselves deem their unhappiness to be not God-given, but Nazi-given.
This is a novel about Germany ailing with its Nazi past, and therefore by no means a historical novel but a very contemporary one. From where this ailment stems is common knowledge, but its manifestations vary. That is why this is also a novel about life at middle age, about the time when the certainty to be on the right way in life has vanished, and it is just as much about loneliness as it is about friendship.
»This book withstands a second reading, as it shows, in literature's abundant ways, the antagonism of remembrance. Remembrance weighs heavily on the lives of Hans Frambach und Graziela Schönbluhm who do not have anything in common other than their suffering over the NS crimes. They have involuntarily become surrogates of the real victims but seem to have accepted this role. Subsequently, they slowly free themselves from their horrible spell and turn from the real thing in history to the real thing in their own lives: It is impossible to live with this blame. To have illustrated this again so vividly after 65 years of intensive discussion is the merit of this novel – which was written, as must be said, after and in spite of Auschwitz.« (FAZ)
»An author who writes wittily, sincerely and without the slightest sensationalism.« (Spiegel)
»Iris Hanika is looking for "the ultimate thing" und poses the question how to escape his own life through reappraising the NS past.« (SWR)
Rights sold: German Paperback (btb Random House), Italian (Atmosphere Libri), Latvian (Amber Line), Romanian (Vivaldi), Bulgarian (IG Elias Canetti), Czech (Dauphin), Serbian (Mono & Manjana)

A gentle and cheerful book that will open your eye to the world with literary finesse.
Out of thin air is the tenth book Eleonore Frey published at Droschl and also her most cheerful one.
Helen Schnee, the story's heroine virtually falls onto the writer's desk, which marks the beginning of a close-knit relationship between the two of them. Helen Schnee, as most characters in Frey's books only loosely bound to bourgeois reality, tries to gain foothold in this new world and eventually ends up at “Open Ear” – a kind of helpline, an organization that could however also turn out to be something completely different.
However, it is not only work that defines the bourgeois individual, their dwelling and marital status are just as important – and therefore, Helen Schnee is given a place to stay as well as social contacts. The circumstances do not meet her expectations, though, and with the consent of the author, she breaks free again and goes on to live her floaty life somewhere else – but keeps her interest and empathy for the people that have crossed her path.
Eleonore Frey's prose counters the world of established identities, of facts and figures and stone-cast certainties with gentle skepticism and unwavering commitment to all those who have lost their footing or never gained a foothold in reality in the first place. That literature is made up of words and phrases is common knowledge, as is the fact that it is rather “manufactured” than “created”. It is ever so rare, however, that a writer grants this much of an insight into her way of working and is credited with “sublime attentiveness and subtle empathy” (by the jury of the Swiss Book Award).

Doctor Robert Sieburg is abducted, maybe somewhere in the Middle East, maybe somewhere in Central Asia. Not mastering the language, ignorant of the customs and unsure of what to expect, he roams the mountains and plateaus with the kidnappers, a strange tribe, members of an unknown order. He is asked to write down his experiences and thoughts, and learns that these writings serve as “connection to God”, through them, “truth speaks”. Only rarely, the captive gets to call his wife. Their conversations, she tells him, are broadcasted on TV.
Ex voto takes the reader to an archaic, mythic, apocalyptic world as Kronenberg skilfully evokes the secrets, menaces, but also the magic of this foreign and lonely world. With his interpreter and translater Harry, acting as an interface between Robert and the new world, he enters a peculiar pact. Meanwhile, the borders between truth and tale, reality and image, presence and past become blurred. The more the captive gets used to his new life, the more he estranges his readers; and the suspicion he bears towards himself unfurls.
Impressively, the novel unfolds, and the captive, utterly helpless at first, eventually gets the upper hand. The story revolves around cult and iniation, violence and death, faith and faithlessness, freedom and loss of the self. With Ex voto, Kronenberg presents an extraordinary, captivating novel about the political myths of today.
Dangerous and mysterious is the world, and in these whirring uncertainties only the text lends support.

An account of Greenland that goes beyond a mere scenic narration: a piercing study on being different.

Travelling to Greenland to find oneself? Discovering in the Inuit, the country's indigenous people, the paradigms of one's existence? This is what Anna Kim describes in her account of this polar island where nature's marvels are so far from everything the tourism industry sells as beautiful – the barrenness, the emptiness, the colours and shapes of ice, snow and water.
Anna Kim reveals the colonial history of this country; a history as relentless and humiliating for its inhabitants as any other colonial history on earth, producing extremely damaged identities and, demographically speaking, a large degree of Danish-Greenlandish crossbreeds – a mixed culture emerging in an atmosphere of constraint and great loss. What it means to talk Danish or Greenlandish there, to look different, to be part of one culture or not, and what price there is to be paid in terms of safety or foreignness when one gets caught in this machinery of identity deciding upon inclusion or exclusion – this is what Anna Kim reveals in her book. In an oppressing, tormenting account, the South Korean-born Austrian writer puts her perceptions and conversations from the Greenlandish capital of Nuuk to paper.
But there is something else this essay puts straight: that travelling can serve as a vent for a yearning to find one's natural environment as existential foreigner, to be foreign in one's own right, out of one's own free will.

Unusual views on the 20th century in Russia – a playful and sensible novel.

Marina, a native from Petersburg, is visiting Germany where she gives a talk on Daniil Charms and his friends. There is also a man, who studied Russian in Leningrad and with whom she had a love affair twenty years ago. The past is not over yet – and this applies to more than just to this private story. “I am afraid of time's secrets.” An entire century – sometimes even more – unravels in front of Marina's associations, and nowhere else has this last century been more plentiful, more fragmented by frictions/frissons in the social system than in Russia: think of the Tsar's empire and the revolution, the Soviet Union, the World Wars, the German occupation of Leningrad, perestroika …
In her first novel, Olga Martynova, lyric poet and essayist, presents difficult situations with enchanting ease: the multiple facets of the past, the “patina of time”, the gliding of attitudes and opinions only literature is able to convey. We not only read of the members of the literary avant-garde surrounding Charms and Vedenskij, but also learn of hippies and rural communes in Inner Asia, of hitchhikes to Siberia and of a Buddhist monastery with a llama refusing to putrefy. Martynova's precise eye also reveals astonishing observations of her German environment, of this audience interested in Russian cultural ties. Even parrots survive us is a touching and astonishing novel, ignoring paradoxically what its protagonist demands, “that complicated things are better left unsaid in novels”. And what would be more complicated than the meandering of time into the past, than the associative tissue of remembrance or the poets' handling of our remembrance?

Close-ups full of fury and grim comedy

When Bernhard Strobel's first volume of stories Dead End was published, it was called an “amazing debut” (Stuttgarter Zeitung) by an “author who considers people from the margins of society more interesting than the chic and the beautiful of this world” (Kurier). The book was declared a “masterpiece of omitting or, rather, not telling, which is something other than deliberate concealment, because it is more difficult”. (Antonio Fian)
In his second volume, Strobel sticks to his motif: This is no piece of feel-good literature, no lifestyle book committed to sophisticated entertainment, but crudity and rejection of elegance. There is the scarce world of losers: elderly mothers prostituting themselves on the internet, outlaws resorting to remote wood huts, having to deal with refugees there, or Alzheimer patients. Strobel, however, does not indulge our voyeuristic gaze at misery, nor does he make eerily beautiful scenes of it, but rather addresses the speechless surroundings of these “heroes”. Lack of communication and unfocussed, blunt fury prevail. Curt and sparsely, extremely straightforward, Strobel portrays a world struggling to keep up its façade – a world which threatens to implode any moment under the aggression breaking free. And still: As described in one of the stories, “She knew me well enough to know that time and again, I would lose the red thread of everyday life”, these narratives invariably leave the illustrative realism at one point, revealing a grotesque joke, an almost surreal overexposure of the scenery, a sometimes cruel sense of humour.
»This book embellishes nothing and succeeds for precisely this reason.« (Die Wienerin)

Unconventional and light-footed, and yet concise and enigmatic: this is another way of writing about love these days!

In Andreas Unterweger's “charming and virtuoso debut” (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung) In the Seventh, first-person narrator Andreas writes, “At nights, we would dream about the sea, and in the mornings we would then wake up to actually find shells in the flower boxes on the window sill.”
In this second book of his, the sea plays a central part: HE and SHE, a couple justifiably reminiscent of the one in In the Seventh, spends a week in a little Scottish village by the seaside – but HE forgot to bring his camera and therefore resorts to taking pictures with sentences. He thus creates a “photo album” with haiku-like, striking pictures, as well as “a novella (in 3x77 pictures)”. But what about the outrageous event a novella by definition requires? Well, what could be more outrageous than the emergence of life, the birth of a baby? The narrator's wife is pregnant – while the father-to-be, with the best of intentions, is understandably nervous. However, this is not a book on pregnancy or the weather in Scotland – no, You Are My Sea is as much a book on literature as is it a book on life itself.
With incredible lightness, Andreas Unterweger faces “the dilemma of the second book”. Phrase by phrase, picture by picture, You Are My Sea creates a thick tangle of motives in prose; charming, witty, tender, clever and full of this special poetic power that is out of the ordinary. Not only is the book's outer appearance unique, but also the entire literary universe of this writer: feathery light, unsentimental, yet heart-warming.

Having spent her childhood and youth in Central Europe at a time when the political and cultural structures of the region were being reorganised, Ilma Rakusa traces memories of herself as a little girl in these recollections. Daughter to a Slovenian father and a Hungarian mother, she lives in a succession of places, first in a small Slovenian town, then in Budapest, Ljubljana, Trieste, Zurich, and, moving further to the East and West, in Leningrad/Saint Petersburg and Paris. Used to being a foreigner, to not quite belonging, she at a very early stage in her life resorts to music, to playing the piano, and, upon the discovery of Dostoievsky, to literature, but also to movement, displacement, travelling. More of the sea is more than just a retelling of childhood and youth, it is the invocation of what remains of one's life's places and encounters: sounds, colours and moods, single scenes and snapshots. By means of numerous self-reflections, dialogues, poems and memories, Ilma Rakusa traces her own story, evoking the constant relocations initiated by her father, the maritime paradise of Trieste and Grado, first kisses, first trips, the music and the encounter with rituals of the Orthodox Church, the first years abroad in Paris and in Soviet Leningrad. Ilma Rakusa approaches her early life quite unsentimentally and without the eagerness of a confessor but instead with great accuracy in the difficult field of the atmospheric – which she grounds with her concise and precise style. This collection of memories evokes the 1950s and 1960s from the prismatic perspective of an extra-ordinary writer who, like few, lives in and between different cultures.

Winner of the Swiss Book Prize 2009
Rights sold: German paperback (Berlin Verlag/Bloomsbury), Arabian (Kalima), French (Édition d'en bas), Italian (Sellerio), Hungarian (Magvetö), Czech (Archa), Serbian (Clio), Slovenian (Belletrina)

What bliss it is when situations and circumstances are simple, when all beginnings are easy. When love comes as easily as art, when writing novels is like having a cup of coffee and only playing the guitar is a bit rough – then this is easy living! Obviously, Andreas and Judith not only live in the seventh district of Vienna but also are in seventh heaven. Love gets off to a good start, just as the writing does. Unterweger's novel On Cloud Nr. 7 is as easy as it is serious, dealing with how important beginnings are and how powerful dreams ought to be in order to compete with reality (the real reality!). On Cloud Nr. 7 is an endearing and charming book about living and writing, about hopes and worries, about the differences between a song and a novel. Combining the stubborn gentleness of a Richard Brautigan with the laid-back irony of postmodernism, Andreas Unterweger's ingenious debut has everything a debut could ask for.

Dreams are the best stories – at least according to surrealist views, if not always substantiated by convincing examples. Where Breton & Co. – not to forget Freud – unarguably had a point, though: dreams are indeed an unfathomable source of ludicrous humour and absurd ideas, which only need to be given the right shape. Fian's first-rate dreams turned into first-rate short stories contain everything we love in our sleep productions, ranging from executions and disasters to sexual bizarreness and the fulfilment of very special wishes.

Serveral stories are taken up in “Best of European Fiction 2010”

Tinged with autobiographical details, Helbich's text The House tells the story of a woman over 60, who, against any reason and against the well-meaning advice of her friends, grants herself her dearest wish and buys an old house. It is almost love at first sight – even though the house is located in a village in a neighbourhood she did not want to live in. It is also derelict and dank and – what is worst for her – utterly disfigured by the thoughtless conversions and pragmatic refurbishments of past times. And yet, she buys this “wounded” house with its “wilderness” of a garden. These words reveal plenty about the writer and her prose. Ilse Helbich describes the house and garden as maltreated creatures whose original form and dignity she seeks to reinstate, at first with deeds and then by writing this book, using words like “growing into”, “hulling” and “unfolding”. Straight-forward and unadorned, this recount of the gradual development of the house, of the wary approchement to some neighbours, or the collectively experienced flood threatening to wash out the foundation is incredibly captivating.

Of the countless living and dead people roaming Vienna Thomas Stangl has singled out two for his third novel: Emilia, 17, whom we meet in the summer of 1937, on the eve of the historic tragedy, and pubescent Andreas, who tumbles into a crisis 40 years later, and who, just like Emilia, lives with his grand-mother. In overwhelming images Stangl captures what, at least in contemporary literature, defies description and what usually only films are able to convey. He creates spaces of transition, of blurs, forebodings and deja vus, spaces for the living and the dead, for history and its victims, dying and disappearing, reality and dream. Thomas Stangl's sentences are a frenzy of perception blurring the boundaries between the inside and the outside, having a liberating effect as only few books do - a literary masterpiece.

"Stangl is opening doors of perception to us. He works to re-write the lost time. This is a piece of literature in which I feel very free." (Iris Radisch in her eulogy at the Telekom-Austria award ceremony).

A wonderful book about childhood... on the bliss of being both father and child.
For David Wagner, being a child is intrinsically tied to being a father - it is being embedded in the sequence of the generations that accounts for that special condition of childhood in the first place. Looking at your own child brings back memories of the child you once were. In Speaks the Child, David Wagner looks into the little rituals and actions "the child" performs on a daily basis. Observing in a calm, unobtrusive way, Wagner lends his ear to the languages of childhood. "Speaks the Child" is a delightfully affectionate book where childhood is not considered a problem but an opportunity for contemplation and reflection.

"The Proust-inspired West German stylist" (New York Times)

A young woman having herself be abducted by two men because she likes the guys to fight over her. A bookmaker's where residential property and a voluntary declaration of drug possession are being wagered. A teacher stalking a pupil, invading his past and his provenance.

In his first novel, Stefan Schmitzer takes the reader to troublesome spots in our cities, our social lives: hardship, violence, lack of perspectives - the perfect conditions for a very special action movie. In a straightforward, colloquial tone Schmitzer tells the ballad of a young mother who gives away her child, torn between inarticulate violence and failing attempts at self-discovery. However, "it's not about her anyway": the dominant narrative strand is her adolescent son's encounter with his potential fathers and their half-hearted search for her. It is about a group of people with varyingly bad perspectives (if any) but with a lot of power. "wherever she might have gone, it's not about her anyway" is a film-like comic-strip ballad, with fast cuts, memorable angles and a very extraordinary atmosphere.

Hans is one of those persons that, come hell or high water, won't fit into the busy world of the common people. Bulky, bearded and mute, he is always in someone's way, one of those outcasts of society who are feared by many and and insulted by even more. Acting in keeping with its name and age of 33 years the figure can indeed be taken as an example. "...can I not sometimes say with the violin what I never knew in words?" a friend of Hans is wondering, and it is by reading sentences like that that we become aware of what is happening here: Eleonore Frey writes sentences telling us what we have not known in words until now, surprising us with the most profound insights told in the simplest words.

"One of the most discrete and most amazing writers of Swiss contemporary literature" (NZZ)

Shortlist Swiss Book Prize 2009

You don't know where, you don't know when – but at some point love will strike, that's for sure. In this novel, two people, already well accustomed to single life, are struck completely out of the blue. He has the most fascinating eyes in the world, and her beauty sweeps him off his feet.

"Treffen Sich zwei" (lit.: two people meeting) is a romantic novel for adults, a heimat novel set in Berlin's Kreuzberg district. It's about desires and anxiety, about the professional life of a systems coach and the fits of a gifted hysteric, about self-help sex books, music, lyrics, classic passages about love, and with a good deal of alcohol and urine therapy thrown in for good measure.

Iris Hanika is a sensitive and unerring observer of the emotional condition of us contemporaries. The wittiness, accuracy and elegance in her writing demonstrate why this eternal theme in literature continues to touch every one of us to this day.

Rights sold to France and Spain

Since the end of the war in former Yugoslavia more than 30.000 persons were reported missing to the International Committee of the Red Cross. Until today only some 15000 persons were identified.

This is the background to the story Anna Kim tells in her second novel: the search of a Kosovar for his missing wife and the first-person narrator's gradual penetration into the complex correlations behind this traumatising event. Not only does she experience the everyday life in the Serbo-Albanian conflict zones of the Kosovo, the gut-wrenching work of the archaeologists and forensic anthropologists or the Red Cross questionnaires to collect “antemortem data”. Above all, the dimensions of memory and the loss of it, of interrupted biographies and of a “frozen time” open up in front of her.

In the extraordinary book, Anna Kim takes up where she left off in her debut novel “Die Bilderspur”, exploring the concepts of “foreign”, “foreignness”, “interrupted biographies” with a depressing relevance to the present. However it is not just contemporary history that she is interested in, but also the linguistic portrayal of such incomprehensible horror, the search for the right words and sentences to describe the “completely different”.

Anna Kim was born in South Korea in 1977. She studied Philosophy and Theatre Studies in Vienna and published her pieces in literature magazines. Her first novel, “Die Bilderspur”, appeared at Droschl in 2004.

In fact, everything is different. In fact, there is fiction on one side and reality on the other. In fact, this is just a pretence because in reality –
These well-known figures of speech (and thought) are where Almut Tina Schmidt's fast-paced first novel takes off at. The narrator travels to Antwerp (under a pretence) but she ends up first in Cologne, then in Bonn und continuously stumbles upon former school mates. Which may very well make us suspicious already. When in the end, the story grows to be a child-abduction thriller and we learn that her long-lost friend acts on behalf of her aunt Agnes, the plot turns into a complete grotesque.

In fact, “In Reality” is a story about the opaque relation between art and life, between original sound and art radio. It is for a reason that Almut Tina Schmidt once and again alludes to Orson Welles who, in his legendary radio adaptation of “The War of the Worlds”, so brilliantly blurred the boundaries of fiction and documentary.

But in reality, the novel deals with paranoia and false façades, with the idle talk the entertainment industries offer us as true form of authenticity, with the different, yet so identical jargons neurotically claiming the special and unmistakeable character of the individual. Fictitious, true – everything is equally grotesque. However, there is a distinct oppressive note to the funniness of this novel. For it is not really funny to have the rug pulled out from under your feet …

Almut Tina Schmidt, born in Göttingen, Germany, in 1971, studied literature, philosophy and political science, and today lives in Freiburg, Germany. She works as a free-lance writer producing novels, children's books, plays and radio plays. Her first novel “Auswachsen” was published at Droschl in 2002. In 1999, she was awarded the Berlin “Open Mike” prize and received the German literature award “Das neue Buch” in 2003.

Hardly an author of ours is as competent as Barbara Frischmuth when it comes to investigating the complex relations between Orient and Occident, between Middle East and West. The "Book of 1001 Nights" constituted her initiation into the book world, as she says, and ever since, the fascination with the cultural riches of the Islam has pervaded her own work in many ways.

Throughout the last years the Orient, Turkey and the Islam have been present not so much in culture as in politics. The fear of foreignness has been showing in previously inconceivable forms; dissociation and identity politics (but also ignorance) determine the political discourse on migration and the European Union.

This volume presents a selection of essays, speeches and other pieces on “oriental issues”. It is about the Muslim headscarf, the European element of Europe, about the EU and Turkey, and Muslim women, but most of all it is about the cultural riches the literature of the Orient would shower us with (if we just appreciated it) and about Islamic and Christian mystics or ingenious translators like Friedrich Rückert. Frischmuth's essays exemplify the fecundity of independent thinking – with wit, scepticism and cleverness she puts straight prejudices and set opinions of those German (or Austrian) contemporaries who like to think of themselves as definitely unbiased and open-minded.

Barbara Frischmuth, one of the most vital voices of Austrian literature, was born in 1941 in Altaussee, Styria. She studied Turkish and Hungarian, has published her work since 1962 and counts among the founders of the literary forum “Forum Stadtpark” in Graz. Until today more than 40 of her works as well as Hungarian translations, radio plays and essays have been published. Her latest novel “Vergiss Ägypten” was published at Aufbau-Verlag in 2008. Her collected poems „Schamanenbaum“ (2001), „Dossier 4: Barbara Frischmuth” (edited by Kurt Bartsch, 1992) and Dossier Extra: Barbara Frischmuth (edited by Silvana Cimenti and Ingrid Spörk, 2007) have been published at Droschl.

With Dead End for a title, Strobel's first work is coming on strong, suggesting a narrator who likes to approach things in a decidedly detached, matter-of-fact way. Strobel's style is not an embellishing one; abandoning literary elegance and false pretence he chases his protagonists towards their emotional dead ends: crisis situations, tensions in the family, among friends and neighbours.

“It's impossible not to be enthralled by the pithy, suggestive style of Strobel.” (Werner Schuster) “Virtuoso close-ups of the everyday scenes, the helpless gestures and awkward inadequacies of shared life – eerie but, at the same time, eerily captivating.” Susanne Jäger, ORF (Austrian Broadcasting Corporation)

Bernhard Strobel was born in Vienna in 1982, and continues to live there and in Northern Burgenland. He reads Scandinavian Studies.

Werner Schwab who in his lifetime was almost exclusively seen as a dramatist defined himself as a prose writer mainly. In interviews, he, time and again, pointed out that “thousands of pages of prose” were stored in drawers. In Volume One of his Complete Works one of these texts has been published for the first time now - i. e. Schwab's novel "Joe Mc Vie alias Josef Thierschädl" written by him during a stay in Denmark and immediately before he started working on his success "The Presidents/Holy Mothers". "Joe Mc Vie", in many respects, occupies a central position within the works of Werner Schwab. In it he laid the foundation for the Schwabian - his soon well renowned idiom, composed of witty jokes, parodies and many alienated parlances - and in it one source of Schwab's social criticism can be found, too: "Joe Mc Vie" takes place at a time when Kurt Waldheim ran for President of Austria and at the time of the 50th anniversary of Austria's “Anschluss” (union) with the German Reich, thus reflecting the political and social discourses of the time.

Meeting the Bieresch is set “in a mysteriously eerie no-man's-land” (according to the German author Wolfgang Hildesheimer) in the region of Seewinkel at the Eastern shore of the Austrian Lake Neusiedl. Narrator Hans, an ethnologist, stumbles upon an outlandish but strangely familiar ethnic minority, the Bieresch. Following an archaic rite they make him act as his recently deceased uncle. The world he gradually unravels turns out to be a maze-like night-mare of mutual interpretations and readings, of rituals and observations of others, of Kafka and Kabbalah, of stories, anecdotes and conjectures firmly and inescapably taking hold of him.

“A literary, allusive, suggestive enigmatic work of a rather worldly sensuousness standing out from the mass of literary works virtuously sticking to reality.” Alexander Kluy, Der Standard
“Meeting the Bieresch comprises a lot: a postmodernist novel, an ethnological bildungsroman, a modern version of mythopoeia as well as a multi-faceted criticism of civilisation. Above all, however, it constitutes an enticing book that merits being read and discovered anew.” Uwe Schütte, Volltext (Austrian literary magazine)
“I would like to suggest contemplating those novels by Peter Handke or Christoph Ransmayr, by Elfriede Jelinek or Urs Widmer, published throughout the last two and a half decades, from another angle for a change – as if those authors were Hoffer's successors.” Hermann Wallmann, WDR (West German Broadcasting)

Klaus Hoffer was born in Graz in 1942, and continues to live there as free-lance writer and translator. His main work Meeting the Bieresch was first published in 1980/83.

No other writer, with the possible exception of Helmut Qualtinger, has captured Austrian mentality – whether of intellectuals or the general populace – more accurately than the Carinthian-born Viennese resident Antonio Fian.

“To those who usually settle for the easy answer Probing Questions will come as a shock. It is Fian's running commentary on the status quo of Austria and the whole world. (…) Most of Fian's plays are based on quotations; from other people's forced seriousness his art springs. The Austrian “antipathetician” takes refuge in joking and, in this way, rescues us.” Paul Jandl, Neue Zürcher Zeitung
“Whether it is the VIPs or Mr. and Mrs. Jones he is pestering: thanks to his fine sense of humour, which makes you smile inside, his criticism, though sharp and biting, is at no point scathing. Antonio Fian's latest mini-dramas are out. Hurray!” Peter Pisa, Kurier

Born in the Carinthian town of Klagenfurt in 1956, Antonio Fian has lived in Vienna since 1976. At irregular intervals he comments on (predominantly) Austrian culture and society for which he was awarded the Austrian State Prize for Cultural Journalism in 1990.

Vienna in 1922. Balthasar Beck returns exhausted, but uninjured to his native Vienna and hesitates for several days before deciding to see his family. Haunted by harrowing memories of imprisonment, of the carnage and horrors of war, he has trouble readjusting to his former life. At his old job with the criminal investigation department, he is confronted with a series of mysterious and atrocious murders that seem somehow connected with the time just served in Siberia.

Ice Whispering captivates the reader with its intensity and the accuracy of its historical details: the climate of Vienna in the early 1920s – with people´s minds set as much on the recently abolished monarchy as on growing anti-Semitism –, the prisoner of war camps in the faraway East, the battles in the Russian steppes, disease, hunger, and misery. With her detached point of view, Balàka crafts all these elements into a highly sophisticated social panorama.

Prädikat: lesenswert (Jury ORF-Bestenliste)

A new novel by Thomas Stangl, winner of the prestigious »aspekte« literature award.

The reader is plunged into a frenzy of remembrances and fantasies of a mother and her daughter, and risks getting lost in them. The story is set in Leopoldstadt, a district of Vienna steeped in history, where Emilie and her daughter Dora have spent their entire lives – and do so until the very end. A splendid read that raises perception to a another dimension.

Telekom-Austria Preis 2007
Literaturpreis der deutschen Wirtschaft 2007

One is instantly consumed by the poetic and genuine language of these soliloquies whose narrator wishes that »all words were equally true and familiar«; and by saying so she brings up alienation (strangeness) between herself and the world, as it has not been brought up with such a serene melancholy, for quite a while. A light melancholic shade lies upon these pages, a thougtfulness almost forbidding determined action. These young towners see their »being-here« as a »good-bye exercise«.

»In a surprisingly authentic tone that doesn't chum up to anybody or anything, Andrea Winkler deals with what can be dealt with by poetic means.« (Der Standard)

Theodor-Körner Preis 2006
Stipendium der Hermann Lenz Stiftung 2006
Literaturpreis Wartholz 2008

Nina (»I am a boy. I am a girl. I don't know what I am. I cannot make up my mind. But since I'm both of them I am in an awkward position.«), Nina has a backpack full of paraphernalia she keeps carrying about, seventeen pieces altogether – a mouth organ among them, a water bottle, a lipstick and a walkman. That makes seventeen stories, at least seventeen convergences towards a person, seventeen sketches, at least, attempting to get hold of this character, to get behind her and/or his very history. In her subtile prose that defies imitation and avoids any definition, Eleonore Frey conjures up the world of a seventeen-year-old girl. It is an insecure, perilous, small yet complete world portrayed with sympathy from a distant, slightly ironic angle.

Mela Hartwig (1893-1967) is one of the great unknown authors, a modernist and feminist, whose career was destroyed by the nazis.
This book, her second novel, could not be published in its time; she was forced to emigrate, went to London, where she made friends with Virginia Woolf. She never returned but for short visits and stayed in England until her death.

Am I a useless person? is the story of an insignificant and most dispensable secretary without special abilities or talents who lives in a tragic and humiliating dependency from her erotic obsession. A pitiless description of the social situation of the late twenties in Vienna and a self-humiliation of its own kind.

A brilliant speech for an other quality of life, for reading, for slowness. Ilma Rakusa devotes to breakneck speed in the working world, in communications, in tourism and in entertainment and she askes finally: "How much speed can we handle?"

In the 1820s two little known travellers are on their way to what for Europeans is still a legerndary city: Timbuktu. One of them is Major Alexander Gordon Laing, who is leading a caravan from Tripolis across the Sahara; the other is René Caillié, who, without a commission or any support, is trying to travel as a Muslim, alone or with changing companions, from Senegal to the Niger. Not far apart, in 1826 and 1829, they each arrive at their desired destination to soon leave it again: the one, after unbearable hardships, reaches Marocco and later France; the other vanishes forever. Setting out for the unknown, daring an exploit, thinking in fantasies – in one word, storytelling. In a flood of imagery, in sweeping sentences of great density and suggestivity, Thomas Stangl fabricates a reality around the longing for the unknown at the crossroads between colonialism and private folly – an adventure novel after all adventure novels, one in witch the actual adventure takes place from one sentence to the next.

»A masterpiece!« (Roger Willemsen)
»A terrific novel« (Tilman Spreckelsen, FAZ)
»A wonderful book!« (Hardy Ruoss, Literaturclub)
»A sensationel debut« (Olga Martynova, Die Zeit)
»Congenial!« (Andreas Langenbacher, NZZ)

aspekte-price for the best debut 2004