English world rights (Voland & Quist)
This collection of unpublished stories and vignettes by Marcel Beyer is a book about perception, style, listening, and writing.
One morning, Marcel Beyer drives out to the edge of Dresden in search of a postbox – not just any postbox, but the one that belonged to Vladimir Putin when he lived here in the 1980s. It is no longer there. But what Beyer sees and writes down in the course of his investigations gradually develops into a portrait of Putin that is infinitely more enlightening than any weighty political biography.
Whatever Beyer turns his attention to in these stories and sketches, his meditations on language, culture, and political geography are always inspired by concrete phenomena – be it flowers above Lake Geneva, a classified ad posted by Rimbaud, a one-eyed lion at the Dresden Zoo that was provoked to roar by Dostoyevsky, a miniature painting by Gerhard Richter, or G. E. Lessing’s fire screen in Wolfenbüttel.
»Reading Beyer, you begin to look more closely at the things around you and to be more patient in trusting your own associations and digressions.« Literarische Welt
»Without a doubt one of the finer literary pleasures currently on offer.« FAS
»Marcel Beyer is a wonderfully clear-sighted storyteller. His writing is breezy and intelligent and always carries its double and deeper meaning with it. Marcel Beyer compares this art of gradually surrounding a topic in ever tighter linguistic circles to the circumvention techniques employed by spies and special agents.« Bayern 2 Radio
Marcel Beyer was born and raised in Cologne. The author of several novels and collections of poems, he has received numerous awards and was named one of the best young novelists in the world by The New Yorker. He lives in Dresden.
Marcel Beyer was born and raised in Cologne. The author of several novels and collections of poems, he has received numerous awards and was named...
There is a performance at the trashy theatre. Hildegard Knef gets in a car. Rudolph Moshammer carries his Yorkshire Terrier around Munich. S. T. Coleridge makes a joke about Cologne. Works of art...
Kurdish rights (tîr-verlag)
Considering this current moment of great change as well as the 20th century when death became a master from Germany, is literature still possible? Does it still have a reason for being in a post-Auschwitz world where all cultural production can only be an expression of barbarism? Or is literature necessary, indeed indispensible, precisely because of such atrocities? Which methods must such a...
English World Rights (New York Review of Books), France (Ça et La), Netherlands (Scratch Books), Slovak Republic (Brak)
English world rights (Harcourt), Spanish world rights (Edhasa), Chinese simplex rights (People’s Literature Publishing House), Arabic world rights (Kalima), France (Métailié), Italy (Einaudi), Netherlands (Cossée), Sweden (Bonniers), Norway (Pax), Czech Republic (Havran), Hungary (Magvetö), Croatia (Fraktura), Serbia (Geopoetika), Turkey (Ayrinti)
Domestic Rights Sales: German Audiobook (Lindhardt & Ringhof / Saga Egmont)
World War II. The final days of the Third Reich. Hermann Karnau, a sound engineer, is obsessively compiling an archive of every conceivable nuance of human sound. Karnau's work so impresses...
USA (Harcourt), UK (Secker and Warburg), Spanish world rights (Debate), Russia (Amphora), France (Calmann-Lévy), Italy (Einaudi), Netherlands (Meulenhoff), Denmark (Gyldendal), Sweden (Bonniers), Korea (Hyonamsa), Japan (Sanshusha), Poland (Słowo / Obraz Terytoria), Slovakia (Slovensky Spisovatel), Bulgaria (Balkani), Estonia (Tänapäev), Serbia (Geopoetika), Turkey (Ayrinti), Israel (Books in the Attic)