Suhrkamp Insel

Polina Barskova

Living Pictures

They refuse to seek shelter in the cellar and wait it out in the dark, draughty art gallery, defying the cold and the hunger. Mojsej, 25, and Antonina, 37, work at Leningrad’s Hermitage, one of the most beautiful museums of fine arts in the world. In the winter of 1941/42, it becomes their last refuge.

Priya Basil

In Us and Now

This book is a search. For a position, a community, a perspective. Led by the memories of what she experienced as the daughter of a patriarchal Indian family, Priya Basil describes the oppression of women, as well as their incredible resourcefulness, and discusses the questions that need to be answered on the way to justice and equality. In Us and Now is at once a self-discovery of elegant beauty and brilliant analysis.

Zoë Beck

Paradise City

Germany in the near future. The coasts are flooded, large parts of the country are depopulated and nature is reclaiming deserted communities. Berlin is nothing but a backdrop for tourists. The government has moved to Frankfurt, which has merged with the entire Rhine Main Area to become one single megacity. In those places where infrastructure exists, it works flawlessly. Virtually all life is controlled by algorithms. Everyone is fine – as long as they don’t ask any questions.

Nora Bossong

Tomorrow Too

Be it in her award-winning novels, reportages or essays – Nora Bossong’s texts unfailingly take us straight into the painfully relevant problems areas of our time. Where others make snap judgement or withdraw into themselves, she looks closely, listens with compassion and asks questions: about colonial guilt and global justice, about the West’s claims to power and the nature of evil.

Gabriele Diechler

The Island of Roses

Bookseller Emma travels to London to be close to her deceased parents one more time, because that’s where they had met and fallen in love.

Oswald Egger

Either I Only Dreamt the Journey Along the Mississippi Or I’m Dreaming Now

Does everything flow? Like a progressively osculating billowing jumble in the form of words and forms without words, swirlings, dispersions and clusters of waves of reveries breaking in on themselves, flowing past the riverbanks of an internal landscape.

Peter Fabjan

A Life Alongside Thomas Bernhard

»You’ll just have to do it in my stead,« Thomas Bernhard instructs his half-brother Peter Fabjan when he senses that he doesn’t have long to live. And the brother, seven years his junior, obeys and accepts responsibility, this time for a difficult legacy – just as he has always done, ever since he was young, when his older brother needed him. To him, he was »the kind brother,« whereas Fabjan considers himself more as a »helper in times of need,« for it was often enough that he found himself playing the role of driver and servant who sat at the side table while his brother chatted with famous politicians and celebrities from the art world.

Urs Faes

Daytimes

A man and a woman meet late in life and experience once again deep affection and happiness, in everyday life and on travels to the landscape of his youth – the Rocky Mountains in Wyoming. But their delights are soon joined by the infirmities of old age, Jakov becomes increasingly forgetful.

Julia Glesner

Opera for Everyone

Not only was he an opera star, he was also one of the most fascinating people of his time: Sir Peter Jonas, an impressive figure, elegant, quirky, funny. With a family story that exemplifies the turmoil of the 20th century.

Durs Grünbein

Beyond Literature

In his four Lord Weidenfeld Lectures held in Oxford in 2019, poet Durs Grünbein deals with a topic that has occupied his mind ever since the moment he started to perceive his own position within the history of his nation, his language community and his family as historic: How is it possible that HISTORY, the fetish of the humanities since Hegel and Marx, determines the individual imagination into the private niches, into the ludic drive of poetry? Shouldn’t its poetry look at the world with its own, sovereign eyes instead?

Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht

»The Prose of the World«

Philosopher and translator, critic and writer, art agent and encyclopaedist: Denis Diderot, born in Champagne in 1713, died in Paris in 1784, was one of the defining figures of the movement that went down in history as the European Age of Enlightenment. But what is the vanishing point of his multifarious œuvre, which is characterised by downright centrifugal dynamics – unlike the works of his contemporaries Voltaire and Rousseau, Schiller, Kant and Hume?

Petra Hardt

Loving at a Distance

Loving at a Distance talks about the author’s experiences in the hotspots of the high-tech sector in California: the Silicon Valley and the college towns of Berkeley and Stanford. The regular transatlantic journeys to visit her children and grandchildren in California aren’t really helping the grandmother understand the Californian way of life and work.

Rafael Horzon

The New Book

Ten years after Rafael Horzon’s successful autobiography The White Book not much has been reported about the former darling of Berlin’s intelligentsia. It’s become too quiet, in his opinion. And so, he brings himself to try once more: With a new book, he wants to set himself up as the most important intellectual of the 21st century; indeed, even finally win the much longed-for Nobel Prize. But he can’t think of anything to write about.

Hans Joas

Under the Spell of Freedom

How do the history of religion and the history of political freedom relate to one another? The diversity of opinions on this in the fields of philosophy, the humanities and social sciences and in the public is vast and confusing. And yet, the sublime synthesis in which Hegel once united Christianity and political freedom is still of enormous guiding power for many – despite or maybe because of Friedrich Nietzsche’s influential provocations.

Susanne Kaiser

Political Masculinity

»We must re-discover our masculinity,« is the appeal to German men by Björn Höcke, probably Germany’s most famous right-wing politician. With this demand, the AfD politician is not alone: From New Zealand to Canada, from Brazil to Poland, right-wing populists, so-called »Incels«, but also Christian pro-life activists are connecting with one another under the banner of masculinity to push women back to a subordinate place in an allegedly natural hierarchy.

Ursula Keller, Natalja Sharandak

Dostoevsky and Women

As a young man, shy and self-conscious, Dostoevsky only met his first wife when he was in his early thirties: Maria Isaeva. »Despite the fact that we were rather unhappy together,« remembers the writer after her death, »we still could not stop loving one another.« Even while Maria was still alive, he began a passionate affair with Polina Suslova, who became the model for his »infernal« female characters.

Thomas Kunst

The Cliffs of Zandschow

Bengt Claasen is sitting in his car, all his earthly possessions in the boot. In front of him, on the dashboard, sits the collar that belonged to his deceased dog. Wherever it falls down, he is going to stop and start a new life. He drives as slowly and carefully as he can and eventually, he reaches Zandschow – a tiny village in the far north with a fire-fighting pond as its centre.

Julia Leeb

Humaneness in Times of Fear

Photojournalist Julia Leeb reports from the most dangerous places on the planet. She experiences up close how people behave in extreme situations, be it during the battles of the Nubians in the Sudan, among warlords in the Congo, during the war in Libya, the revolution in Egypt or under the isolated dictatorship of North Korea.

Sibylle Lewitscharoff

Pong at the Abyss

Things aren’t great with our flighty hero. Not even the clear night sky can entice him from his bed. The disappointment about the humiliation his »so-called friend« inflicted on him is too great.

Juliane Liebert

songs to the great void

On the brink of sleep, walking around in the big city, we encounter Nikolai Gogol and Marianne Faithfull, sock dandies and party girls, the damaged and those left behind, »face down«, »on broadway at the bus stop«, »for ten, fifteen minutes, really«. They are »so tired of the games, even the knives are sick of stabbing«. Because what else is the heart but a »muscular hollow organ« – octopuses have three of them, us people: »a sudden fear of trains«.