Usable People

A sex worker’s new colleague is made of silicone. A butcher’s assistant handles ultra-modern killing machines in the »meat factory«. And the trainees of an airport security firm are supposed to internalise that only rule-compliant behaviour makes them human.

Magdalena Schrefel’s characters are faced with the absurd everyday challenges of late capitalism – automation, control, precarity – and find surprising ways to deal with the unreasonable. And they inquire about the conditions under which literature is created: How does it capitalise on people? Is writing work, and indeed work that is relevant to the system?

»Subtly, Schrefel talks about the corporeality of speaking and about the strange disembodiment of script.« Marlen Hobrack, taz. die tageszeitung

»Schrefel is a master of creating characters with loose strokes, same with dialogues, which always teether on the brink of the absurd; you can sense her years of experience as a playwright. It is hard to believe that this is a prose debut.« Linda Stift, Die Presse