Suhrkamp Insel

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.

Nana Ekvtimishvili

The Pear Field

The Pear Field takes place in the 1990s in Tbilisi, capital of the recently independent country of Georgia. At the heart of the novel is the “School for Idiots”, a boarding school for “mentally deficient children”, actually visitied mostly by children whose parents are either dead or who have emigrated for economic reasons. Even the teachers leave the children and teens to their own devices.

Hans Magnus Enzensberger

Survival Artists

The 20th century was the heyday of writers who had survived state terror and purges with all the ethical and political ambivalences that this entailed. How did they manage to do that? Were they too steadfast to bend to the powers that be? Did they owe their survival to their foresight, their intelligence or sharpness, their belief in themselves, their connections or their tactical skill? Was it serendipitous circumstances bordering on a miracle that helped them escape from prison, camps and death, or was it strategies that spanned from ingratiation to disguise? If only it was possible to make a clear-cut distinction!

Didier Fassin

Life

Since antiquity, life, in Adorno’s words, has been the true field of philosophy asking about what the right and good life was. For a little more than a century, however, life has also become a subject of the social sciences. The renowned French physician, anthropologist, and sociologist Didier Fassin proposes a critical dialogue between philosophy and social research.

Daniel Martin Feige

Design

Whether furniture, hoardings, websites, clothing, pictograms, cars, or urban spaces: design is omnipresent. Only in philosophy has it up until now not received (almost) any consideration.

Alexander Fischer

Manipulation

In his extremely clearly written book, Alexander Fischer applies himself to a fascinating phenomenon, whose everyday significance can barely be overestimated: Manipulation. He first deals with the subject conceptually, and then embeds it in an action-theoretically way and finally examines its specific psychological manifestations. Fischer closes with the outline of an ethic of manipulation, which teaches a new perspective by means of a critical examination of the paradigmic trio of rationality, freedom and dignity.

Dorothea Gädeke

Politics of Control

Should we actively support processes of democratisation in other parts of the world? With the end of the cold war, liberal democracy appeared to be ready to spread throughout the world. Established democracies attempted to support this process. But since the beginning of the new century there has been a backlash and ever more often there are accusations of imperialism.

Arjun Appadurai, Zygmunt Bauman, Donatella della Porta, Nancy Fraser, Eva Illouz, Ivan Krastev, Bruno Latour, Paul Mason, Pankaj Mishra, Robert Misik, Oliver Nachtwey, César Rendueles, Wolfgang Streeck, David Van Reybrouck, Slavoj Zizek

The Great Regression

At the latest, since the effects of the financial crisis became clear and migration to the European Union began to grow, we have seen developments that many had thought were the phenomena of a distant age: the rise of nationalistic, in part anti-liberal parties like the Front National and the Alternative für Deutschland, the profound crisis of the EU, a coarsening of public discourse thanks to demagogues like Donald Trump, a growing distrust of the established media and the spread of xenophobic ideas... all of which are a reminder of dark times. Politicians are vilified as »traitors to the fatherland«, Muslims are under general suspicion and the internet is awash with the crudest of conspiracy theories.

André Georgi

The Last Terrorist

A young woman is caught in the clutches of terrorism and is sent on a risky mission. Chased by the BKA, the Federal Criminal Police Office, and put under pressure by her comrades, she is forced to make a difficult decision …

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.

Peter Handke

The Fruit Thief - or - A simple Trip into the Interior

The Fruit Thief is nothing less than the book of the world: within it everything is possible, in both a positive as well as a negative sense. And reading it means: to have new experiences beyond everything previously imagined or depicted. In sum: a brand new novel from Peter Handke.

Christoph Hein

Trutz

A brilliant chronicle of the lives of two families in 20th century Germany and Russia. The futile hope for an existence beyond misery and slavery. Encompassing an entire century, reflecting an entire century.

Axel Honneth

Recognition

In his new book, Axel Honneth traces the idea of recognition and the diversity of meanings it has taken on since the beginning of modernity in Europe. Referencing three powerful schools of thought – the French, the British and the German – he traces the way it has in each case experienced entirely different philosophical interpretations and sociopolitical expressions due to various sociopolitical challenges.

Andreas Izquierdo

Miss Hedy Dreams Of Flying

»Lady in her prime seeks cavalier to drive her to the nudist beach. Payment guaranteed.« – An ad in the local newspaper sets the ball rolling: Hedy von Pyritz, 88 years old, disciplined, sharp-tongued, vain. Keen mind, dry humour, at times offensive. An old lady, who usually sits in a wheelchair, causes a substantial scandal in the small town in the region of Münster, where she resides in grand style.

Rahel Jaeggi

Progress and Regression

Progress denotes social change towards a situation in which conditions are becoming not only different, but better – by abolishing slavery, for example, or declaring rape within a marriage a crime. Many would agree to that, and yet, the notion of a general social progress has lost its appeal. It even elicits skepticism. On the other hand, the inclination to evaluate the increase of authoritarian resentments and right-wing populist movements as a kind of regression grows.

Uffa Jensen

The Politics of Rage

If we had a device for measuring the intensity of collective feelings, at the moment it would be in the red: in most of our political debates rational arguments and mutual respect have given way to fury, hate, and anxiety.

Hans Joas

The Power of the Sacred

The Power of the Saint is the attempt to demystify »disenchantment«. In order to do so, Hans Joas has dedicated himself to exemplary cases of scientific engagement with religion since the 18th century. In a direct confrontation with Weber, he develops the outline of a theory that can satisfy religion’s potential to support existing power structures as well as critique them.

Sarah Khan

The Fortune Teller’s Babblings

Apartment clearance and tabula rasa, fire or impulse sale – what drives people to sell their things for small change via classifieds? In all seriousness, with an intention to buy, Sarah Khan met numerous people who advertised and listened carefully when they started to recount their life stories – and created literature from oral history. The outcome is a series of stories about separation and new beginnings, happiness and unhappiness, of rising or already-burst dreams.

Esther Kinsky

Grove

Profoundly empathetic, and austere – a minor-key exploration of landscape and land. Grove is a novel in three parts, each of them concerned with a different journey in a different Italy. In the first part, the narrator, recently bereaved, travels to a small village south-east of Rome. It is winter, and from her temporary residence on a hill between village and cemetery she embarks on walks and brief outings, exploring the banal and the sublime with equal dedication and intensity. Her perception is coloured by bereavement and the need to process her loss, but also by a profound curiosity in the details that make up the life around her and the way they refer to the many places of the dead, from the local cemetery to the ancient Etruscan tombs on the coast. Gazing, seeing, describing, naming the world around her is her way of redefining her place in this world.

Tatjana Kruse

Mermaids Murder Better

Three strangers demolish Konny and Kriemhild’s bed & breakfast and demand that the sisters hand over the millions that the Commodore, Kriemhild’s deceased husband, owes them. Did the Commodore really unearth a treasure illegally, scam his crew, sell the treasure and stash away the money in a secret place?