Joanna Bators neuer Roman erzählt von weiblichen Lebensentwürfen. Und wie sie scheitern. Im drängenden, sarkastischen, an Elfriede Jelinek erinnernden Ton entfaltet sich das Drama der zornigen Frauen, die ihr Geheimnis durch die Generationen weitergegeben haben. Krieg, Gewalt und privates Unglück haben die Angst und Bitternis hervorgebracht, aus deren Bannkreis erst die Jüngste, Kalina,...

März 1946. In Blakendorf in der Lüneburger Heide versucht der Kriegsheimkehrer Schmidt sein Leben neu einzurichten. Er wird in eine Baracke eingewiesen, die auch zwei junge Flüchtlingsfrauen, Grete und Lore, bewohnen. Die Not ist so groß wie die Verachtung der Einheimischen für die Flüchtlinge. Gemeinsam versuchen sie, über die Runden zu kommen. Schmidt, der an einer Biografie über Fouqué...

Von einer Zeit, in der die Hoffnungen auf radikale Veränderungen in der Ukraine begraben werden. Als »Barrikadenpianist« hat er die Revolution zu Hause unterstützt. In der Emigration verdient er sein Geld als Salonmusiker - Josip Rotsky, ein Mann unklarer Identität, dessen Name sich auf Trotzki, Brodsky und Joseph Roth reimt. In einem Schweizer Hotel muss er für den Diktator seines Landes...

Auch in diesem Roman der österreichischen Autorin fasziniert das buchstäblich unheimliche Talent, Alltagsgeschichten auf den Grund zu gehen. Welche Entfaltungsmöglichkeiten hat eine Arbeiterin? Sie kann einen Mann heiraten, der ihr den gesellschaftlichen Aufstieg garantiert. Doch wie andere Möglichkeiten, so sind auch sozial attraktive Männer rar, und die attraktivsten sind schon vergeben. So...

September 1913. A young Pole suffering from tuberculosis arrives at Wilhelm Opitz’s Guesthouse for Gentlemen in the village of Görbersdorf, a health resort in the Silesian mountains. Every evening the residents gather to imbibe the hallucinogenic local liqueur and debate the great issues of the day: Monarchy or democracy? Do devils exist? Are women born inferior? War or peace? Meanwhile,...

Twisting the art of the fairytale into something entirely her own, Alla Gorbunova’s (Th)ings and (Th)oughts is a spellbinding collection of thematically-linked short prose. A teacher contemplates leaving her husband after learning that he doesn’t have a soul; a functionary realizes that the only way to survive in contemporary Russia is to go insane; cars fall inexplicably from the sky;...

An extraordinary love story and a captivating novel about the power of memory and imagination: Flanders 1922. After serving as a soldier in the Great War, Noon Merckem has lost his memory and lives in a psychiatric asylum. Countless women, responding to a newspaper ad, visit him there in the hope of finding their spouse who vanished in battle. One day a woman, Julienne, appears and recognizes...

One of the great prose stylists of his generation, André Aciman returns to the essay form in Homo Irrealis to explore what time means to artists who cannot grasp life in the present. Irrealis moods are not about the present or the past or the future; they are about what might have been but never was but could in theory still happen. From meditations on subway poetry and the temporal resonances...

A group of college friends find themselves marooned at a luxurious hotel on the Amalfi Coast in Italy. While their boat is being repaired, they can't help but observe the daily routine of a fellow hotel guest - a mysterious, white-bearded stranger who sits on the veranda each night and smokes one cigarette, sometimes two.

This book contains seven stories about family. On its pages, you will meet a teenage girl in a yellow cap. She will tell you about street sweepers, golden leaf-fish, and how her father decided to remarry. Her story will be picked up by a boy living with his mother and jealous of her ‘side job.’ Then a character will enter, whose heart is stirred by a past love. Love for a girl who already has...

ets of Norway's capital in pursuit of nourishment. In four episodes he meets a number of more or less mysterious persons, the most notable being Ylajali, a young woman with whom he has a semi-sexual encounter. This woman haunts him and he attempts to refind her to no avail. The character falls into traps of his own making, and with a lack of food, warmth and basic comfort, his mind turns slowly...

In one of the first twenty-first century Russian novels to probe the legacy of the Soviet prison camp system, a young man travels to the vast wastelands of the Far North to uncover the truth about a shadowy neighbor who saved his life, and whom he knows only as Grandfather II. What he finds, among the forgotten mines and decrepit barracks of former gulags, is a world relegated to oblivion,...