Airy-Fairy

Illustrations by Nicolas Mahler
Suhrkamp | Insel

Airy-Fairy / Larifari
Illustrations by Nicolas Mahler
The only way to condense Friederike Mayröcker’s 100+ books into one slender volume is through the minimalism of Nicolas Mahler
Airy-Fairy: A Confused Book. That was the title of the first volume of poetry by the great Austrian poet, Friederike Mayröcker, who passed away in 2021, just three years before her 100th birthday. The first milestone in one of the great oeuvres in Austrian letters.

The collection shares its title with the brief text that closes out the book. In comic artist Nicolas Mahler’s treatment, something spectacular takes place: the individual phrases of this text are woven together...
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Airy-Fairy: A Confused Book. That was the title of the first volume of poetry by the great Austrian poet, Friederike Mayröcker, who passed away in 2021, just three years before her 100th birthday. The first milestone in one of the great oeuvres in Austrian letters.

The collection shares its title with the brief text that closes out the book. In comic artist Nicolas Mahler’s treatment, something spectacular takes place: the individual phrases of this text are woven together with another passage from Mayröcker’s enormous oeuvre. And the poet herself is also constantly in some kind of dialogue, whether with her partner and collaborator Ernst Jandl, or with Snoopy (in a blue tracksuit), Salvador Dalí, even Gertrude Stein stops by. Nicolas Mahler is there for everything, capturing all the scenes in his unmistakable, minimalist brushstrokes.
»Illustrator Nicolas Mahler has put plenty of insane things on paper, but Airy-Fairy, based on Mayröcker’s first book, Airy-Fairy: A Confused Book (1956), trumps everything.« Frankfurter Rundschau
»Illustrator Nicolas Mahler has put plenty of insane things on paper, but Airy-Fairy, based on Mayröcker’s first book, Airy-Fairy: A Confused Book (1956), trumps everything.« Frankfurter Rundschau
2024, 95 pages
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Persons

Friederike Mayröcker was born in 1924 in Vienna, where she died in 2021. From 1946 to 1969 she taught English at various secondary schools in Vienna. Her first literary works date back to 1939. She began publishing poems in journals in 1946, her first book was published in 1956. She wrote poetry, prose, plays, radio plays and children's books and was honoured with numerous distinguished national and international literary awards.

Friederike Mayröcker was born in 1924 in Vienna, where she died in 2021. From 1946 to 1969 she taught English at various secondary schools in...


OTHER PUBLICATIONS

Collected Poems
Year of Publication: 2024
Friederike MayröckerYear of Publication: 2024
When Friederike Mayröcker celebrated her 80th birthday in 2004 and her Collected Poems 1939–2003 appeared, she made the decision to go off in an entirely new direction. Gradually, this line developed into a form of its own, which she dubbed the »proem« – encompassing lyrical illumination and clear-eyed observations of the world, shifting between short prose and poem. She made it her...
My Therapist is a Psycho
Year of Publication: 2024
Nicolas MahlerYear of Publication: 2024
For people plagued by obsessions, madness, nightmares, or a fear of commitment, sometimes, chaos therapy, light therapy, happiness training or aromatherapy can help. But what should you do when all these fail? That leaves only one remedy: the cartoons of Nicolas Mahler! They’re definitely cheaper and easier to use. It certainly can’t hurt to give them a try.
Completely Kafka
Year of Publication: 2023
Nicolas MahlerYear of Publication: 2023

Franz Kafka not only wrote prose, he was also passionate about drawing: »Did you know I was once a great drawer,« he wrote about his artistic ambitions, half ironic, half proud, to his...

Rights sold to:

English world rights (Pushkin Press), Spanish world rights (Salamandra), Chinese simplex rights (Folio [Beijing] Culture & Media), France (L'Association), Italy (Clichy), Czech Republic (Argo)

Black Mirrors
Year of Publication: 2021
Nicolas Mahler, Arno SchmidtYear of Publication: 2021
The summer of 1960. A man is cycling through a ghostly landscape. A nuclear strike five years earlier has depopulated the earth, and quite thoroughly at that. The man forages in the deserted villages...
Rights sold to:

Suhrkamp represents the rights for Nicolas Mahler’s contribution to the volume. The underlying rights to the work by Arno Schmidt are represented by the Arno Schmidt Foundation.
Thomas Bernhard
Year of Publication: 2021
Nicolas MahlerYear of Publication: 2021

»Thomas Bernhard is born in Heerlen (the Netherlands) on February 9, 1931. The afterbirth has the shape of Austria.« – thus begins Bernhard’s biography as drawn by comic artist Nicolas Mahler.


The grand master of minimalism, who has previously and »congenially« adapted Bernhard’s Old Masters and The World-Fixer, takes readers on a wickedly funny tour...

Ulysses
Year of Publication: 2020
Nicolas MahlerYear of Publication: 2020

Dublin, June 16, 1904: a day in the life of the advertising agent Leopold Bloom and the sensations of the ordinary – James Joyce has created a maximal book from a minimum of matter:...

Rights sold to:

English world rights (Seagull), Chinese simplex rights (Horizon), France(L’Association)

as mornings and mossgreen I. Step to the window
Year of Publication: 2020
Friederike MayröckerYear of Publication: 2020

»Esteemed listeners, do not try to lift the secret of this text«, orders Friederike Mayröcker in her new work of prose – but even its title leaves an infallible...

Rights sold to:
English world rights (Seagull), Denmark (Palomar)
Jimi
Year of Publication: 2020

»Jimi the Polar Bear was lying in the arms of the sleeping child, his paws crossed. It was 1 very young polar pear the size of a puppy and he hardly dared to breathe so as not to wake the child. The child was dreaming that Jimi was lying in its arms and told him 1 story.«


Thus begins the short poetic story of Jimi the Polar Bear and the child Emma, told by the great Austrian poet...

The Little ABC of Survival
Year of Publication: 2018
Nicolas MahlerYear of Publication: 2018

Sometimes, it just hits you and you don’t even know why. That’s when life seems nothing but chaotic, devastating and confusing. Fighting this, however, is profoundly pointless – and anything but funny. If, yet again, you’ve rushed into one of those crises at full throttle and can’t find your way out, you should take a look at The Little ABC of Survival. From »Age« to »Work«, from...

Pathos and Swallow
Year of Publication: 2018
Friederike MayröckerYear of Publication: 2018
Friederike Mayröcker had to spend the summer months of 2015 in hospital. For weeks she is cut off from her writing cave, the legendary paper enclosure of her poetic work. Writing in the strange,...
Rights sold to:

English world rights (Seagull), Denmark (Arena), Sweden (Ellerstöms)

In Search Of Lost Time. Adapted from Marcel Proust
Year of Publication: 2017
Nicolas MahlerYear of Publication: 2017

Marcel Proust’s Recherche is one of the most important French novels, if not the most important – reading it can be life changing. Nicolas Mahler’s comic is not a retelling, not a...

Rights sold to:

English world rights (Seagull), Chinese simplex rights (Horizon)

fleurs
Year of Publication: 2016
Friederike MayröckerYear of Publication: 2016

fleurs – the flowers, the flower petals, they give this book its title, make us think of spring, of mild air and gently flowing ribbons. But if you let yourself be lured onto that...

Rights sold to:

English world rights (Seagull)

Party Fun With Kant
Year of Publication: 2015
Nicolas MahlerYear of Publication: 2015
Austria’s best-known comic artist, Nicolas Mahler, presents hitherto unknown scenes from the lives of twenty-two of the world’s most famous philosophers: we go to a party with Kant, visit an art...
Rights sold to:

English world rights (Seagull), Chinese simplex rights (Horizon)

Previously published in the respective language / territory; rights available again: Czech Republic (Archa)

cahier
Year of Publication: 2014
Friederike MayröckerYear of Publication: 2014

Friederike Mayröcker doesn’t have time. Neither for résumé and memory, nor for extensive observations and reasoning and certainly not for storytelling. She doesn’t even have time for life itself...

Rights sold to:

English world rights (Seagull)

Lulu and the Black Square
Year of Publication: 2014
Nicolas MahlerYear of Publication: 2014

In his brilliant new graphic novel Nicolas Mahler purges Frank Wedekind’s tragedies Earth Spirit und Pandora’s Box and creates a black comedy about the corporeality of women, the possessive mentality of men, and Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square.


Frank Wedekind’s man-eating Lulu once again finds herself in a Suprematist’s atelier. Struggling back and...

The World-Fixer
Year of Publication: 2014
Nicolas MahlerYear of Publication: 2014
An elderly scholar, paralysed and hard of hearing, a philosopher and petty tyrant, who is set to receive an honorary doctorate for his barely comprehensible »Treatise for the Improvement of the...
Rights sold to:

English world rights (Seagull), Czech Republic (Archa)

The Man Without Qualities
Year of Publication: 2013
Nicolas MahlerYear of Publication: 2013
There are books that a person just has to have read. We can know this, and still recoil from them. These books seem too massive, too challenging, too awe-inspiring. Robert Musil’s The Man...
Rights sold to:

English world rights (Seagull), Spanish world rights (Salamandra), Chinese simplex rights (Horizon)

Previously published in the respective language / territory; rights available again: Italy (Edizioni Clichy), Czech Republic (Archa)

études
Year of Publication: 2013
Friederike MayröckerYear of Publication: 2013

Études is what Friederike Mayröcker calls her prose poetry and lyrical prose pieces, studies then, or »shreddings«, as she says, splintering, brittle and highly concentrated; the language...

Rights sold to:

English world rights (Seagull)

Poems
Year of Publication: 2013
Nicolas MahlerYear of Publication: 2013
A philosophy of life presented in image-poems about the absurdity of existence

Poems worthy of Beckett, Cioran and Wittgenstein’s praise

Written by the »existentialist...
Rights sold to:

English world rights (Seagull), Czech Republic (Archa)

Alice in Sussex
Year of Publication: 2013
Nicolas MahlerYear of Publication: 2013
Alice is back in Wonderland. Here she meets the White Rabbit, who leads her down into his rabbit hole in search of an illustrated edition of H. C. Artmann’s Frankenstein in Sussex. Over the...
Rights sold to:

English world rights (Seagull), Spanish world rights (Salamandra), Russia (Boomkniga), Slovenia (VigeVageKnjige)

just sitting around here GRUESOMELY now
Year of Publication: 2012
Friederike MayröckerYear of Publication: 2012
It is summer in this book, even if nature often does not hold to summer. The flowers either have tiny buds or have long since withered. It is summer in the book, asserts Mayröcker’s work, because the...
Rights sold to:

English world rights (Seagull), France (Atelier de l'Agneau), Denmark (Palomar)

Previously published in the respective language / territory; rights available again: Bulgaria (Ergo)

Old Masters
Year of Publication: 2011
Nicolas MahlerYear of Publication: 2011
The devilishly funny comedy by Thomas Bernhard illustrated from one of the most internationally known German-language cartoonists.


Rights sold to:

English world rights (Seagull), France (L'Association), Sweden (Staka), Serbia (Bulevar)

Previously published in the respective language / territory; rights available again: Spanish world rights (Sinsentido), Poland (Proszynski), Czech Republic (Archa)

Scardanelli
Year of Publication: 2009
Friederike MayröckerYear of Publication: 2009

Rights sold to:

USA (The Song Cave), Spain (Ediciones de Aqui), France (Atelier de l'Agneau)

Previously published in the respective language / territory; rights available again: Sweden (Ellerströms), Hungary (Pluralica)

And I Shook Myself a Beloved
Year of Publication: 2005
Friederike MayröckerYear of Publication: 2005
Spiegel Online: »Have you ever considered writing, rather straightforwardly and at length, about your relationship with Ernst ...
Rights sold to:

English world rights (A Public Space), Czech Republic (Dybbuk)

Previously published in the respective language / territory; rights available again: Sweden (Ellerströms)

brütt
Year of Publication: 1998
Friederike MayröckerYear of Publication: 1998

»brütt«. To Friederike Mayröcker a symbol of pain and hardship, of the cold and of grief, were it not for the »sighing gardens« that lend a soft counterbalance to the stirrings of love...

Rights sold to:

Previously published in the respective language / territory; rights available again: English world rights (Northwestern UP), France (Atelier de l'Agneau)

The Heart-Wrenching Nature of Things
Year of Publication: 1990
Friederike MayröckerYear of Publication: 1990
The book is the continuation of a kind of biography that began with Night Train; the continuation of a merciless enchantment.
Rights sold to:

France (Atelier de l’Agneau)


DISCOVER

News
On 20 December 2024, the Austrian author would have celebrated her 100th birthday.