books

DE → EN – Enjoy in English

This regular page brings you a selection of German-language titles that have just been, or are soon to be, published in English. We cover fiction, crime, nonfiction, children's and YA and poetry.

Spring 2022

Clicking on the title of a book will take you to its page on the publisher’s website.

Have we missed anything?! Let us know by emailing Sarah at shemens@new-books-in-german.com

Fiction

Tasting Sunlight – Ewald Arenz

Translated by Rachel Ward

Orenda Books, June 2022

An anorexic teenager escapes from a clinic and forms an unlikely friendship with a farmer. The two damaged women slowly heal as they work the land, in an achingly beautiful debut.

Teenager Sally has just run away from a clinic where she is to be treated for anorexia. She’s furious with everything and everyone, and wants to be left in peace.

Liss is in her forties, living alone on a large farm that she runs single-handedly. She has little contact with the outside world, and no need for other people.

Achingly beautiful, profound, invigorating and uplifting, Tasting Sunlight is a story of friendship across generations, of love and acceptance, of the power of nature to heal and transform, and the goodness that surrounds us, if only we take time to see it…

Lilly and Her Slave – Hans Fallada

Translated by Alexandra Roesch

Scribe, July 2022

Almost 100 years after Hans Fallada committed himself to prison, previously unpublished and rewritten stories by the bestselling mid-century German author have been discovered.

It was the turning point before he became a bestselling author: Hans Fallada handed himself in to the police in September 1925, following repeated cases of embezzlement to finance his alcohol and morphine addiction.

At the time, a court-appointed doctor was assigned to assess the extent to which Fallada could be made accountable. This expert opinion, thought to have been lost, was only recently rediscovered. It is an extraordinary find, because it includes unpublished and rewritten stories by Fallada that reveal his early, unparalleled insight into the female psyche, and that focus on hitherto taboo topics such as rape and abortion.

These stories — written while the author was relishing the opportunity in prison to free himself of his addictions — reveal to a new generation of readers Fallada’s immense gifts and his intense battles with the dynamics of human relationships.

These tales from the estate of Hans Fallada are a gem for fans, as are the circumstances of their discovery.

Welt am Sonntag

The Wall – Marlen Haushofer – UK

Penguin, Vintage Classics, July 2022

The Wall – Marlen Haushofer – US

New Directions, June 2022

Translated by Shaun Whiteside

A woman goes to the Austrian mountains to spend a few days in a hunting lodge with her cousin and his wife. When the couple fail to return from a walk, the woman tries to go into the village to look for them. Instead she comes across a transparent wall behind which there seems to be no life. Trapped behind the wall, a result of a too successful military experiment, she begins the arduous work of not only survival but self-renewal. The Wall is at once a simple document of potatoes and beans, of hoping for a calf, of counting matches, of forgetting the taste of sugar and the use of one’s name, and simultaneously a disturbing meditation on our place in the natural world.

Our Happy Days – Julia Holbe

Translated by Imogen Taylor

Text Publishing, January 2022

A vivid tale of love and friendship, coincidence and fate, guilt and betrayal—and the memories of a summer that changed things forever.

Lenica, Marie, Fanny and Elsa spend their summers together on the Atlantic coast in France. The four of them are bound together, their friendship forged in sun-soaked days and wine-filled nights, giddy with happiness and youth.

Decades later, when three of the friends meet again, they realise that their bond has never been broken. Although older, they still carry with them everything that happened years ago—especially the summer that Lenica brought Sean along.

Our Happy Days is a novel about the most important things in life—and it reminds us that we only remember the past as we want it to be.

Song for the Missing – Pierre Jarawan

Translated by Elisabeth Lauffer

World Editions, April 2022

A sensitive and mysterious novel on friendship, family and destruction

It’s 2011 and the Arab Spring is in full bloom when the discovery of two bodies in Beirut sows the first seeds of unrest in Lebanon. With houses already burning, Amin sets out to write down his memories of the country: Of the year 1994, when he returned as a teenager with his grandmother, twelve years after his parents’ deaths. Of his friendship with Jafar, the boy who explored the desolate postwar landscape with him. And of the painful discovery that there will never be certainty—neither about his friend’s past nor his family’s history. In this novel full of mystery and suspense, friendship and loss, searches and secrets, Jarawan skillfully interweaves a deeply personal story with the tumultuous history of the Middle East.

The Fire Above, The Mountains Below by Reinhard Jirgl

Translated by Wieland Hoban

Seagull Books, October 2021

Reinhard Jirgl’s strikingly individual novel The Fire Above, the Mountain Below demonstrates that he is not only unorthodox in his approach to language, but also difficult to pin down in terms of any genre. Weaving together elements of a crime story, Cold War espionage, family tragedy, and a dystopian future, he creates a tapestry of fragile humanity and menacing inhumanity. The investigation of a series of gruesome killings takes a detective inspector into explorations of a secret intelligence programme in former East Germany and the role of a family with a tragic history. The more is uncovered, the more disorienting it becomes, and the reader is drawn into a complex web of discovery and suppression.

Perhaps the most important author in contemporary German literature.

Die Zeit

The Bastard Factory – Chris Kraus

Translated by Ruth Martin

PanMacmillan, July 2022

This book was a New Books in German jury choice, read our original recommendation here.

Chris Kraus’ The Bastard Factory tells the story of an entire epoch: a drama of betrayal and self-delusion spanning the years 1905 to 1975, taking us from Riga to Moscow, Berlin and Munich all the way to Tel Aviv.

Hubert and Konstantin Solm are brothers, born in Riga at the beginning of the twentieth century. They will find themselves – along with their Jewish adopted sister, Ev Solm – caught up in in the maelstrom of their changing times.

The story of the Solms is also the story of twentieth-century Germany: the decline of an old world and the rise of a new one – under new auspices but with the same familiar protagonists.

Three Prose Works – Else Lasker-Schüler

Translated by James J. Conway

Rixdorf Editions, June 2022

Never before translated into English, this trio of works finds one of the greatest German writers of the 20th century mythologising her own pursuit of freedom in captivatingly original fiction.

Issued on the eve of World War One, this sequence of dark fables seethes with violence and eroticism, culminating in a great clash of civilisations in which Tino leads the charge. An insightful afterword details the genesis of these Three Prose Works in the context of the author’s tumultuous life.

A Jewish Girl in Paris – Melanie Levensohn

Translated by Jamie Lee Searle

PanMacmillan, August 2022

Inspired by a true story, a love story between a Jewish girl and a Christian boy, set against the backdrop of the Second World War; for fans of The Tattooist of Auschwitz.

Paris, 1940: Christian, son of a bank director, falls in love with Jewish girl Judith. The young couple secretly plan to flee, but suddenly Judith disappears. Christian begins a frantic search.

Montreal, 1982: Shortly before his death, Lica Grunberg confesses to his daughter, Jacobina, that she has an older half-sister, Judith. Lica escaped the Nazis but lost all contact with his first-born daughter. Jacobina must promise her father to find the sister she never knew.

Marzahn, mon Amour by Katja Oskamp

Translated by Jo Heinrich

Peirene Press, February 2022

Translator Jo Heinrich wrote for us about her experience of translating this book here.

Katja Oskamp knows how to capture the essence of people beautifully. They really come to life in her portraits. A powerful book.

Frank-Walter Steinmeier, President of Germany

A woman approaching the ‘invisible years’ of middle age abandons her failing writing career to retrain as a chiropodist in the East Berlin suburb of Marzahn, once the GDR’s largest prefabricated housing estate.

Part memoir, part collective history, Katja Oskamp’s love letter to the inhabitants of Marzahn is a tender reflection on life’s progression and our ability to forge connections in the unlikeliest of places. Each person’s story stands alone as a beautifully crafted vignette, but together they form a portrait of a community.

52 Factory Lane – Selim Özdoğan

Translated by Ayça Türkoğlu and Katy Derbyshire

V&Q Books, April 2022

Part two of the Anatolian Blues trilogy. For the first novel in the trilogy, The Blacksmith’s Daughter, see here.

‘You’ll live out your lives in a foreign country,’ Gül is warned. But the whole world is foreign when you’re far from your loved ones. The train ride to Germany ushers in the days of long-awaited letters, night-time telephone calls and blissful summers back home. The years of hard work will flow like water before her house in Turkey is built and she can return.

Until then, there will be fireworks, young love, and the cassette tapes of the summer played on repeat. In these years, Gül will learn all kinds of longing: for her two daughters, for her father the blacksmith, for scents and colours and fruit. Yet imperceptibly, Factory Lane in this cold, incomprehensible country becomes a different kind of home.

A novel about how home is found in many places and yet still eludes us.

An absolutely recommended novel that quietly stimulates the reader’s thoughts and portrays the hard work behind seeing a new country as home

migazin

Monsters Like Us – Ulrike Almut Sandig

Translated by Karen Leeder

Seagull Books, March 2022

This book was a New Books in German jury choice, read our original recommendation here.

A novel of two young friends growing up on divergent paths in the last days of Communist East Germany.
 
What is it like to be young and broken in a country that is on the brink of collapse? This is what acclaimed poet and sound artist Ulrike Almut Sandig shows us in her debut novel, through the story of old friends Ruth and Viktor in the last days of Communist East Germany. The two central characters are inseparable since kindergarten, but they are forced to go their different ways to escape their difficult childhood: Ruth into music and the life of a professional musician; Viktor into violence and a neo-Nazi gang. 

Monsters Like Us is a story of families, a story of abuse, a story about the search for redemption and the ways it takes shape over generations.

Identitti – Mithu Sanyal

Translated by Alta L Price

Astra Publishing House, July 2022

This book was a New Books in German jury choice, read our original recommendation here.

The Sellout meets Interior Chinatown in this satirical debut about a German Indian student whose world is upended when she discovers that her beloved professor who passed for Indian is, in fact, white.

Following the uproar, Nivedita is forced to reflect on the key moments in her life, when she doubted her identity and her place in the world. As debates on the scandal rage on social media, blogs, and among her closest friends, Nivedita’s assumptions are called into question as she reconsiders the lessons she learned from her adored professor.

In her thought-provoking, genre-bending debut, Mithu Sanyal enlisted the contributions and commentary of real life public intellectuals as if Saraswati were a real person. A darkly comedic tour de force, Identitti showcases the outsized power of social media in the current debates about identity politics and the power of claiming your own voice.

What Concerns Us – Laura Vogt

Translated by Caroline Waight

Héloïse Press, July 2022

This book was a New Books in German jury choice, read our original recommendation here.

Rahel and Fenna are in their late twenties and early thirties. They are sisters. Their mother Verena, now dealing with breast cancer, raised them by herself.  Rahel, a jazz singer, is pregnant and single but in love with writer Boris with whom she eventually moves in. Meanwhile, Fenna is pregnant by Luc, a man who can turn from charming hippy to aggressor in a heartbeat, raping her on a woodland walk well into their relationship.

What Concerns Us is a blunt depiction of pregnancy, sex, maternity and relationships through the lives of three women.

It is the characters in Laura Vogt’s incisive novel that really appeal to me as a translator. The three women are perceptively and utterly unsentimentally drawn, each with their own type of language: finding a way to bring that alive in English has been an endlessly fascinating challenge.

The book’s translator Caroline Waight

1,000 Coils of Fear – Olivia Wenzel

Translated by Priscilla Layne

Catapult, July 2022

This book was a New Books in German jury choice, read our original recommendation here.

A multilayered and rhythmic debut novel about her life as a Black German woman living in Berlin and New York during the chaos of the 2016 U.S. presidential election from playwright Olivia Wenzel.

Engaging in a witty Q&A with herself—or is it her alter ego?—she takes stock of our rapidly changing times, sometimes angry, sometimes amused, sometimes afraid, and always passionate. And she tells the story of her family: Her mother, a punk in former East Germany who never had the freedom of which she dreamed. Her Angolan father, who returned to his home country before she was born to start a second family. Her grandmother, whose life of obedience to party principles brought her prosperity and security but not happiness. And her twin brother, who took his own life at the age of nineteen.

Heart-rending, opinionated, and wry, Olivia Wenzel’s remarkable debut novel is a clear-sighted and polyphonic investigation into origins and belonging, the roles society wants to force us into and why we need to resist them, and the freedoms and fears that being the odd one out brings.

Olivia Wenzel’s bold and exceptional novel, 1,000 Coils of Fear, tells stories in many voices—of her estranged family, of female and male lovers, of her nation, once home to Nazis and the KGB, still inhospitable to immigrants, and to its Black German author. Wenzel’s novel is not just of and from contemporary Germany, it proposes a different German novel. Her impressive writing, born of a brilliant mind, surprises—stylistically, and by its frankness and associations.

Lynne Tillman, author of Men and Apparitions and MOTHERCARE

She Came From Mariupol – Natascha Wodin

Translated by Alfred Kueppers

Michigan State University Press, April 2022

This book was a New Books in German jury choice, read our original recommendation here.

WINNER OF THE 2017 LEIPZIG BOOK FAIR PRIZE

When Natascha Wodin’s mother died, Natascha was only ten years old—too young to find out what her mother had experienced during World War II. Years later, Natascha set out on a quest to find out what happened to her mother during that time. Why had they lived in a camp for “displaced persons”? Where did her mother come from? What had she experienced?

The one thing she knew is that her parents had to leave Mariupol in Ukraine for Germany as part of the Nazi forced labor program in 1943. Armed with this limited knowledge, Natascha resolved to piece together the puzzle of her family’s past. The result is a highly praised, beautiful piece of prose that has drawn comparisons to W. G. Sebald in its approach. This is a darkly radiant account of one person’s fate, developing momentous emotive power—its subject serves as a proxy for the fate of millions.

‘The author’s voice, so strong, inquisitive and yet wistful, spoke to me throughout my reading of the German version. I am so glad that it has found its way into English. With Rowohlt I am championing its companion volume, ‘Nastjas Traenen’, as this now shouts out for translation into English.

Deborah Langton 
https://deborahlangtontranslator.com

Crime

River Clyde – Simone Buchholz

Translated by Rachel Ward

Orenda Books, March 2022

Mired in grief after tragic recent events, state prosecutor Chastity Riley escapes to Scotland, lured to the birthplace of her great-great-grandfather by a mysterious letter suggesting she has inherited a house.

In Glasgow, she meets Tom, the ex-lover of Chastity’s great aunt, who holds the keys to her own family secrets – painful stories of unexpected cruelty and loss that she’s never dared to confront.

In Hamburg, Stepanovic and Calabretta investigate a major arson attack, while a group of property investors kicks off an explosion of violence that threatens everyone.

As events in these two countries collide, Chastity prepares to face the inevitable, battling the ghosts of her past and the lost souls that could be her future and, perhaps, finally finding redemption for them all.

Breathtakingly emotive, River Clyde is an electrifying, poignant and powerful story of damage and hope, and one woman’s fight for survival.

The coolest character in crime fiction … Darkly funny and written with a huge heart’

Big Issue

Kalmann – Joachim B Schmidt

Translated by Jamie Lee Searle

Bitter Lemon Press, May 2022

This book was a New Books in German jury choice, read our original recommendation here.

WINNER OF THE CRIME COLOGNE AWARD 2021

A touching and very funny Nordic crime thriller with a difference. A tightly plotted suspense story based on a mentally challenged character described with empathy, humour and psychological tact. Forrest Gump meets Fargo. 

Kalmann is the self-appointed Sheriff of Raufarhöfn. Day by day, he treks the wide plains which surround the almost deserted village, hunts Arctic foxes and lays bait in the sea — to catch the gigantic Greenland sharks he turns into the Icelandic fermented delicacy, hákarl. There is nothing anyone needs to worry about. Kalmann has everything under control.

Inside his head, however, the wheels sometimes spin backwards. One winter, after he discovers a pool of blood in the snow, the swiftly unfolding events threaten to overwhelm him. But he knows that his native wisdom and pure-hearted courage will see him through. There really is no need to worry. How can anything go wrong with Kalmann in charge? He knows everything a man needs to know about life – well almost.

Silver Pebbles – Hansjörg Schneider

Translated by Mike Mitchell

Bitter Lemon Press, January 2022

Part of a highly acclaimed 10 book series featuring Basel police inspector Peter Hunkeler, a character with legendary status in crime fiction written in German.

Silver Pebbles is a thriller driven by a chase for stolen diamonds, but also an intimate tale of ordinary people accidentally caught in a vortex of crime, like Hank and Jacob in A Simple Plan by Scott Smith or even Guy Haines in Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith. Unusually, and refreshingly, no one gets killed.

The prequel to The Basel Killings, also published by Bitter Lemon Press in July 2021, winner of the Friedrich Glauser Prize, Germany’s most prestigious crime fiction award. Other winners have included Bernhard Schlink and Martin
Suter.

Nonfiction

Putin’s Postbox – Marcel Beyer

Translated by Katy Derbyshire

V&Q Books, April 2022

Eight essays on literature, language, art, Europe and life
from one of Germany’s most revered living writers.

After a visit to Putin’s old postbox, the reader is taken to
Dresden and Brixton, Gdańsk and Minsk, diverted to birds,
bees, stray cats and pet dogs, confronted with Stasi and KGB, Proust and Jah Shaka, puzzled by overcoats and anoraks, Francis Bacon and Vermeer, and lost (then found) in service stations and memorial centres. Throughout, Marcel Beyer forges unexpected links and makes unpredictable leaps.

Extreme North – A Cultural History by Bernd Brunner

Translated by Jefferson Chase

WW Norton, March 2022

This book was a New Books in German jury choice, read our original recommendation here.

An entertaining and informative voyage through cultural fantasies of the North, from sea monsters and a mountain-sized magnet to racist mythmaking.
In concise but thoroughly researched chapters, Brunner highlights the cultural and political fictions at play from the first “discoveries” of northern landscapes and stories, to the eugenicist elevation of the “Nordic” phenotype (which in turn influenced America’s limits on immigration), to the idealization of Scandinavian social democracy as a post-racial utopia. Brunner traces how crackpot Nazi philosophies that tied the “Aryan race” to the upper latitudes have influenced modern pseudoscientific fantasies of racial and cultural superiority the world over.

Art & Crime
The Fight Against Looters, Forgers and Fraudsters in the High-Stakes Art World – Stefan Koldehoff and Tobias Timm

Translated by Paul David Young

Seven Stories, January 2022

This book was a New Books in German jury choice, read our original recommendation here.

A thrilling, eye-popping look at true crime in the billion-dollar art world.

The art world is one of the most secretive of global businesses, and the list of its crimes runs long and deep. Today, with prices in the hundreds of millions for individual artworks, and billionaires’ collections among the most conspicuous and liquid of their assets, crime is more rampant than ever in this largely unregulated universe. Increased prices and globalization have introduced new levels of fraud and malfeasance into the art world–everything from “artnapping,” in which an artwork is held hostage and only returned for a ransom, to forgery and tax fraud.

From the authors of False Pictures, Real Money (about the Beltracchi art forgery case), Art & Crime includes a chapter on art owned by Donald Trump. It is a thoroughly researched, explosive, and highly topical book that uncovers the extraordinary and multifarious thefts of art and cultural objects around the world.

Never Forget Your Name: The Children of Auschwitz – Alwin Meyer

Translated by Nick Somers

Polity Press, January 2022

The children of Auschwitz: this is the darkest spot in the ocean of suffering that was the Holocaust. They were deported to the concentration camp with their families, with most being murdered in the gas chambers upon their arrival, or were born there under unimaginable circumstances.

While 232,000 children and juveniles were deported to Auschwitz, only 750 were liberated in the death camp at the end of January 1945. Most of them were under 15 years of age. Alwin Meyer’s masterwork is the culmination of decades of research and interviews with the children and their descendants, sensitively reconstructing their stories before, during and after Auschwitz.

The Invention of Marxism – How an Idea Changed Everything – Christina Morina

Translated by Elizabeth Janik

Oxford University Press, July 2022

This book provides a fresh look at a topic that has long been overburdened with political and ideological agendas and demonstrates how Marx – or rather a Marxian way to look at the world – remains relevant today.

Morina has written the first comprehensive historical work on the origins of Marxism as a political movement. It makes a theoretical contribution to the origins and dynamics of political activism and radicalism and grounds the history of Marxism and Marxist politics in a real-life perspective on its major protagonists.

Jena 1800: The Republic of Free Spirits by Peter Neumann

Translated by Shelley Frisch

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, February 2022

An award-winning poet and philosopher reveals the history of the German idealist oasis where discussions of revolution, literature, beliefs, romance, and concepts gave birth to the modern world.

Around the turn of the nineteenth century, a steady stream of young German poets and thinkers coursed to the town of Jena to make history. The French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars had dealt a one-two punch to the dynastic system. Confidence in traditional social, political, and religious norms had been replaced by a profound uncertainty that was as terrifying for some as it was exhilarating for others. Nowhere was the excitement more palpable than among the extraordinary group of poets, philosophers, translators, and socialites who gathered in this Thuringian village of just four thousand residents.

With wit and elegance, Peter Neumann brings this remarkable circle of friends and rivals to life in Jena 1800, a work of intellectual history that is colorful and passionate, informative and intimate―as fresh and full of surprises as its subjects.

The story commences with war and love, but then, most subtly, the reader is led up into the supple distinctions of systematic Idealism. Frisch’s translation lets the reader feel the romance of philosophical insight.

Daniel Purdy, Professor of German, Penn State University

The Aphorisms of Franz Kafka – Reiner Stach

Translated by Shelley Frisch

Princeton University Press, April 2022

In 1917 and 1918, Franz Kafka wrote a set of more than 100 aphorisms, known as the Zürau aphorisms, after the Bohemian village in which he composed them. Among the most mysterious of Kafka’s writings, they explore philosophical questions about truth, good and evil, and the spiritual and sensory world.

This is the first annotated, bilingual volume of these extraordinary writings, which provide great insight into Kafka’s mind. Edited, introduced, and with commentaries by preeminent Kafka biographer and authority Reiner Stach, and freshly translated by Shelley Frisch, this beautiful volume presents each aphorism on its own page in English and the original German, with accessible and enlightening notes on facing pages.

Above all, this volume reveals that these multifaceted gems aren’t far removed from Kafka’s novels and stories but are instead situated squarely within his cosmos—arguably at its very core. Long neglected by Kafka readers and scholars, his aphorisms have finally been given their full due here.

Alice’s Book – Karina Urbach

Translated by Jamie Bulloch

MacLehose Press, May 2022

This book was a New Boks in German jury choice, read our original recommendation here.

What happened to the books that were too valuable to burn?

Impeccably researched and incredibly moving, Alice’s Book sheds light on an untold chapter in the history of Nazi crimes against Jewish authors.

A bestselling 1930s’ cookbook by the author’s Jewish grandmother was published for decades under a false name after the Nazi takeover of Austria.

Alice Urbach had her own cooking school in Vienna, but in 1938 she was forced to flee to England, like so many others. Her younger son was imprisoned in Dachau, and her older son, having emigrated to the United States, became an intelligence officer in the struggle against the Nazis.

Returning to the ruins of Vienna in the late 1940s, she discovers that her bestselling cookbook has been published under someone else’s name. Now, eighty years later, the historian Karina Urbach – Alice’s granddaughter – sets out to uncover the truth behind the stolen cookbook, and tells the story of a family torn apart by the Nazi regime, of a woman who, with her unwavering passion for cooking, survived the horror and losses of the Holocaust to begin a new life in America.

Poetry

Squandered Advice by Ilse Aichinger

Translated by Steph Morris

Seagull Books, March 2022

The first English translation of a major work of postwar German poetry.
 
Austrian writer Ilse Aichinger (1921–2016) was a member of the Gruppe 47 writers’ group, which sought to renew German-language literature after World War II. From a wide-ranging literary career that encompassed all genres, Squandered Advice was Aichinger’s sole poetry collection.

This new translation makes Aichinger’s critically acclaimed book, which has inspired poets in the German-speaking world for decades, available to English-language readers for the first time.

For The Dying Calves – Durs Grünbein

Translated by Karen Leeder

Seagull Books, September 2021

Nonfiction

In his four Lord Weidenfeld Lectures held in Oxford in 2019, German poet Durs Grünbein dealt with a topic that has occupied his mind ever since he began to perceive his own position within the past of his nation, his linguistic community, and his family: How is it possible that history can determine the individual poetic imagination and segregate it into private niches? Shouldn’t poetry look at the world with its own sovereign eyes instead?

For a rather long time now—approximately, since the Berlin Wall came down—the name Durs Grünbein has been the answer to the question: Who’s the leading young poet in Germany?

James Fenton, Guardian

distant transit – Maja Haderlap

Translated by Tess Lewis

archipelago books, March 2022

Infused with movement, Maja Haderlap’s distant transit traverses Slovenia’s scenic landscape and violent history, searching for a sense of place within its evershifting boundaries. Avoiding traditional forms and pronounced rhythms, Haderlap unleashes a flow of evocative, captivating passages whose power lies in their associative richness and precision of expression, vividly conjuring Slovenia’s natural world – its rolling meadows, snow-capped alps, and sparkling Adriatic coast. Belonging to the Slovene ethnic minority and its inherited, transgenerational trauma, Haderlap explores the burden of history and the prolonged aftershock of conflict – warm, lavish pastoral passages conceal dark memories, and musings on the way language can create and dissolve borders reveal a deep longing for a sense of home. At its core, distant transit is an ode to survival, building a monument to traditions and lives lost.

Plays

Fury – Elfriede Jelinek

Translated by Gitta Honegger

Seagull Books, March 2022

A new play from Nobel Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek that deals with the 2015 terror attack on the satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo’s offices in Paris.
 
In Greek mythology, it is Hera who blinds the hero Heracles, so that, in a fit of fury, he kills his own family. In the twenty-first century, the gods have another name. So did the three young men who stormed a magazine’s editorial office and a Jewish supermarket in Paris in January 2015 and murdered twelve people. The blind fury, however, remained and more virulent than ever, not least because the weapons were so much more effective.
 
In this raging text, arguably one of her darkest, Nobel Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek investigates topical political events in the context of enduring history and myths. Fury expresses itself not only multi-voiced and from the changing perspective of Islamist terrorists (and their special hatred of Jews), in the shape of furious German citizens, individual narcissistic humiliation, or brutal distribution battles around the globe. Rather, fury also appears as the motor that has driven people with a devastating force for centuries.
 
Fury is a compact grand epic that starts in primal times and attempts to describe the indescribable, relating the inexplicable in our times.


You can see previous Enjoy in English collections here