The Lives of Books

Do you remember your first kiss? Our first experiences may have been terribly embarrassing, maybe clouded in our memory, yet they mark a beginning. Everything afterward becomes repetition. To be...

ZDF »aspekte« Literary Prize 2025

»This novel will break your heart – and yet, it makes you want to love like Zeko does, just once in your life.« Mithu Sanyal

Thekla swims in open waters, even when temperatures are icy. She views it as a full-body cognitive process. In this wintry landscape, she tries to get to explore the depths of her self, and of the...

I am surrendered to the white, as the white is surrendered to me. Here I am exposed to fear; here, fear is exposed.

»They belong to us, they are one of us and we want them in« – Yuri Andrukhovych had been waiting for this sentence, which presented the prospect of EU membership to his country, for many years. It was uttered in Brussels, three days after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. »A deep exhale – amidst the blaring sirens.«

Twenty years ago, his brilliant volume of essays My Final...

»Now they were all mere playthings in the grasping arms of a state order such as had never existed before. An order that could only be destroyed from the outside by lightning and...

Her husband left the house in a hurry without further explanation. A friend from childhood days turns up unexpectedly, and her usually reserved mother suddenly wields a mysterious power. Mathilda,...

Is it the ancestors that are making the air heavy, crowding around the island? In the form of people, clouds, winds, fish, birds of the mountains, birds of the coast, migratory birds and seabirds that come to Hawaii to flirt, lay eggs, rest and then retreat back to the open sea?

Ancestral Destructions deals with the narrator's spiritual and material prehistory: that is...

In a world shrunk down to the size of a prison cell, every detail becomes important: the cockroach doing its job, the mousetrap that can be used to kill time, the strange rhythms of the collective...

COVID deniers with flower necklaces, artists questioning scientific findings, journalists staging themselves as rebels against alleged gags: Libertarian authoritarians have found their way...

»I have always dreamt of writing a novel that has a sound,« says Yuri Andrukhovych, who has spent his life singing, rehearsing with his band and playing countless concerts. His latest work...

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...

Nimbus, the dark cloud, is a manifestation of momentum, splendour, vastness, and yet it belongs to the realm of the amorphous, impalpable. It takes effect, it determines the atmosphere, at the...

Steffen Mau grows up in the 1970s in Lütten Klein, a neighbourhood of newly constructed residential buildings in Rostock. When the Berlin Wall falls, he is serving with the National People’s Army,...

Ann Cotten has grown up, a fact that catapults us somewhat into the future. She claims that all she is interested in now is a constructive approach to a functioning, reasonable life for everyone (if possible). A philanthropic robot, so to speak. But her strangely labyrinthine yet overly respectful way of confronting problems still shows traces of the experiences she gathered as a young...

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.«...

When everything is text, because everything is code, there is no more work, only wrought material, a semi-finished product. Images, films, sounds, words – in the digital world, everything is open...

Gilbert Silvester, a lecturer and researcher on beard fashions in film, is in shock. The previous night he dreamt that his wife was cheating on him. In one sudden, irrational act he leaves her,...

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....

Whether education, health or consumption: by now, data is gathered on almost every aspect of our personalities and behaviour. Step by step we are becoming a society of stars, scores, likes...

Empathy is considered the basis of moral action. But if we examine this more carefully, the ability to »empathize with other people« proves itself to be a prerequisite for deliberate...

Justice’s Darlings, these are crimes and criminals, real and alleged: Bohdan Stashynsky, for example, a KGB officer and assassin who kills the Ukrainian nationalist Stepan Bandera in his...

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...

»Borrowed sceneries« are a traditional stylistic element in East Asian garden art. A scenery beyond the gardens, often a mountian or an imposing building, is deliberately included in...

What is going on? The Americans are abandoning the moon, leaving the earth’s seemingly dead companion to stragglers. Time to recapitulate: On a Sunday afternoon in Berlin, on the airfield of the disused Tempelhof Airport, poet Durs Grünbein makes a momentuous observation.

»The sun disintegrated.«

Marion Poschmann’s long-awaited new novel is about Germany from the perspective of the grandchildren of war. A novel about the power of time, about memory and...

Durs Grünbein’s volumes of poetry are known for grasping their subjetcs in larger and larger circles, in their concentric sprawl they seem made for this age of globalisation. His new collection of poetry follows the outline of an exhibition. Works from the last five to eight years are presented in seven sections.

There are images of a journey, excursions into the unknown routine,...

Yuri Andrukhovych has invested a lot of time in familiarising himself with foreign cities. In some of them, he got stuck for a while. Others have become true parts of his life:...

»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...

Proceeding on the observation that poetics that create norms and set benchmarks no longer existed, Grünbein traces his poetic career as a »sketch of a personal psychopoetics«.

This...

The term »metaphor« derives from the Greek metà phérein (»to carry elsewhere«), which, in Antiquity, usually meant »by ship«, so that sea travel itself soon became a metaphor for poetry....

Durs Grünbein visited Japan four times, in pursuit of a long elective affinity for the East that is also reflected in his works. During all of the four journeys he kept a travel journal in the...

This volume contains 25 essays. It provides a chronological rip cut of Durs Grünbein‘s rich essay writing over the course of more than 15 years – from the early, much-quoted texts...

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.«

Could they be serious? Ann Cotten employs them in the rattling machines of thought...

The Misanthrope on Capri (a reference to emperor Tiberius) gathers Durs Grünbein’s »histories«, printed in various publications and in his own volumes of poetry – poems that mainly deal...

In the nine essays and speeches collected in this volume, Durs Grünbein circles the prerequisites, conditions and consequences of writing.

»The intimate tries to assert itself through writing,« he says, »paradoxically by exposing itself publicly. But it soon becomes clear that the public is nothing by a particularly impervious protective layer.« Grünbein lets the reader partake in...

The godchild of Rabelais and Bakhtin, Bulgakov and Esterházy, it is a whirligig of forms, styles, and apocryphal traditions – an adventure for readers who view life not as...

»Stop, wanderer, and read!«, called out the tombstones to the passers-by two thousand years ago. Inscriptions spoke of the pleasures of the deceased, of profession and merit, character...

Durs Grünbein notes his experience of reality in crass and direct images and propels his poems forward by the »silent turmoil« of an elegiac expressionism.

In these poems, a...