Friedrich Ani
In My Father's Room
Poetry owes many evergreens to »occasional poems«. In the case of Friedrich Ani, such poems constitute deliberate addressing, musically worded compositions if one considers current political-individual situations the occasion to which one must react immediately, showing oneself and the counterpart in all its vulnerability. These realistic-spontaneous sounds find very different forms: from the rhyming short poem to the prose poem to the extensive cycle.Rights available
Nora Bossong
Crusade with a Dog
In her new volume of poetry, Nora Bossong travels from small-town Germany to the Mediterranean and onwards into the Holy Land and beyond. Her natural manner of movement a shifting back and forth in time. Hungry for experience, she explores poetic scenes from a past hundred of years old and a distilled present. Almost as if by chance, she directs her lens on people, places and traditions, describing them with subtle humour and sensitivity while leaving their secrets intact.Sold to
English world rights (Seagull)
Paul Celan
»an entirely personal matter«
Paul Celan’s exceptional oeuvre of letters – half of them unpublished so far: An oeuvre, on par with the poetic works, of immense stylistic range. Biographically insightful and poetologically fruitful.Rights available
Paul Celan
Poems
Celan’s collected poems – for the first time in their entirety and with new commentary. Close to 60 more poems than the 2003 edition. The history of their origins, sources, cross-references: broken down with summaries and individual notes.Rights available
Ann Cotten
Florida-Spaces
»Want to earn money writing? Want to disclose your most intimate thoughts?« Naturally, people reacted to our invitation in the classifieds and sent in texts. Some of them have been gathered in the present portfolio, which we have tentatively entitled »Florida-Spaces«, borrowed from one of the more unconventional submissions. Its author is the Marienfeld School, a group of philosophising dogs, one of whom, a cocker spaniel/architectural critic, happened upon the one from that requires further examination: the provisional projection, the leaning greenhouse, the post-modern sickness of the mind, the Florida-Space. Other individuals submitted poems, like Bettine, Bettine’s Mother, a revolutionary caddisfly and former Stasi-agent who keeps a journal about her dreams. The texts have been annotated to aid the reader’s understanding.Rights available
Ann Cotten
Sonnets from the Dictionary of Borrowed Words
Weighed down by few associations, artificial, new, or existing in our everyday language merely temporarily – loan words seem to apologise for their existence: »I’m only fulfilling a conceptual function, occupying a job for which there’s no qualified German available at the moment.«Rights available
Ann Cotten
Banned!
Billowing palm trees, a rustle in the celery, a tiger disappears, an atomic bomb detonates in the distance, and a consciousness starts moving backwards. The latter belongs to a TV presenter who has been banished to a deserted island due to numerous instances of grave misconduct, equipped with (as per her own choice) a knife, a grindstone and Meyers Konversations-Lexikon.Rights available
Ulrike Edschmid
A Man Who Falls
Summer 1986. Berlin-Charlottenburg. A man climbs up onto a ladder to paint the ceiling of a flat in a turn-of-the-century building he intends to move into with his partner. He loses his balance and falls. Afterwards, nothing at all is like it was. Little else could have shattered the life of two people at the beginning of their future together in such a brutal way. But what at first seems like an ending slowly turns into the exploration of an unknown continent: one’s own life.Rights available
Oswald Egger
Val di Non
Can you imagine a mountain without its corresponding valley? If you can imagine both God and the world, can you manage to imagine, for example, God without the world? That which hovers before your mind’s eye, from A to Z, often appears more real than what’s confusingly in front of you.Rights available
Hans Magnus Enzensberger
The History of the Clouds
In these 99 meditations, Hans Magnus Enzensberger takes a very close look at things: He feels that clouds are alien and yet symbols of human life. He captures the individual miniscule detail, the fleeting moment and lends it the dignity of presence; and he seeks out the eternal, the law in which being born and dying are but two sides of transience.Sold to
English world rights (Seagull), Spanisch world rights (Poesia Senor Hidalgo), France (Vagabonde), Italy (Einaudi), Korea (Saemulgyul)
Hans Magnus Enzensberger
Kiosk
The kiosk around the corner – outside, it has a lot on offer. Inside, in the semi-darkness, sits a man or a woman, but what they are thinking is a different story altogether. In the past, of course, kiosks couldn’t be found in the city centre but in quiet parks and spacious gardens: delicate pavillons, hexagonal or octagonal, open on all sides. The word ›kiosk‹ comes from Turkish where ›köşk‹ means ›garden hut‹ and the Turks borrowed both the graceful architecture as well as the word from the Persians.Sold to
Italy (Einaudi); Previously published in the respective language / territory; rights available again: English world rights (Bloodaxe), Netherlands (Uitgeverij P), Denmark (Gyldendal), Sweden (Norstedts), Israel (Hakkibutz Hameuchad)
Hans Magnus Enzensberger
Lighter than Air
»As well as being Germany's most important poet, Hans Magnus Enzensberger is a provocative cultural essayist and one of Europe's leading political thinkers. […] Lighter than Air, his [...] collection of moral poems, weighs lightness against seriousness. These are witty, lightly ironic poems on all kinds of subjects, easy in style, engaging in tone, often conversational. Enzensberger is a cultured, learned, widely knowledgeable man, but his poems wear their knowledge, learning and culture very lightly. Perfectly at ease in a variety of poetic forms, he presents us again and again with things that matter.Sold to
Previously published in the respective language / territory; rights available again: USA (Sheep Meadow Press), UK (Bloodaxe), Spanish world rights (La Poesia Senor Hidalgo), Italy (Einaudi), Netherlands (Uitgeverij P)
Durs Grünbein
From the Dream (Files)
The title of a book of poetry could not be any more provocative, and still the poet allows no room for doubt: »In general, that which we call reality is greatly overestimated.« Therefore, with all the power of his imagination, in the first half of his book he leads us into the stormy areas of that reality which most people consider the measure of all things.Rights available
Durs Grünbein
Declared Night
Exploring the possibilities individuals have within the limits of their life-times and the confines of the big city as their living space – these have long since been themes that Grünbein addresses.Sold to
Italy (Einaudi), Hungary (Jelenkor)
Durs Grünbein
Porcelain
The night between the 13th and 14th of February, 1945 marked one of the most brutal and much discussed events of World War II; it was the night that Dresden, one of the most beautiful and culturally rich cities in Europe, was reduced to soot and ash in a matter of hours.Rights available
Durs Grünbein
Verses for the Day after Tomorrow
Durs Grünbein’s new book of poetry is a work of memory and yet also a volume of transitions and transformations. In seven sections and with a variety of different verse forms, Grünbein’s range of images melds to form a picture of the world. Poems on origin are at the beginning, before, in travel poems of all things, the uncanny nature of modern mobility emerges.Sold to
Italy (Einaudi)
Durs Grünbein
Spark Plugs
Spark Plugs is a collection of 83 poems in diverse forms consisting of dream fragments, snippets of speech, prose poems, broken sonnets, and sequences that read like accident reports. They are all based in Italy, on Italian relations, and on Italian motifs in their historical dimensions but also on decay and destruction. There is a strong emphasis on the now. These poems are often quick, and work directly on the level of impression. They vary in form from the sonnet to the long poem. Of the two longer poems in the collection one has to do with the quirks of perception and the relationship between reality, sleep, and dream while the other is interfused with the poet’s own colour photographs. Textually varied, diverse in tone, rapid and at times experimental, this is a solid, well-written collection of poetry.Rights available
Hermann Hesse
The Magic of Colours
At the age of 40, in the middle of World War I, Hermann Hesse started to paint. To him it was an »outlet, so as to be able to bear life even in the direst of times« and to gain some distance from literature. »I’m holding my painting chair,« he writes in 1920, »it is my magic apparatus and Faust coat with whose help I have performed magic thousands of times and won the fight against stupid reality.«Sold to
Russia (Text); Previously published in the respective language / territory; rights available again: Japan (Iwanami Shoten), Croatia (Zagrebacka Naklada)
Hermann Hesse
Butterflies
»I have always had a connection with butterflies and other fleeting and ephemeral beauties, while I have never succeeded in maintaining permanent, committed and so-called solid relationships,« writes Hermann Hesse in a letter from 1926. This preference, occasionally resembling an elective affinity, for »flowers and butterflies, / That are of everlasting things / a fleeting allegory« – as he says in one of his poems, has left its mark on Hesse’s entire oeuvre. This volume gathers the most alluring of his stories, recollections, contemplations and poems on butterflies.Sold to
Korea (Moonye)
Hermann Hesse
At Christmas Time
»My childhood days I think of now, / A long-forgotten fairy tale sound awakens: / Bells ring and on silver shoes / The Christkind walks though the white night.« It’s mainly childhood memories that the poet Hermann Hesse associates with Christmas. But the older he gets the more Hesse distances himself from the business-minded sentimentality that by now shapes the »holiday of love«. A dichotomy between awe and mocking distance permeates the contemplations and recollections gathered here that Hesse wrote on this »always wonderful holiday despite all falsehood«.Sold to
Hungary (Helikon)
