Featured Topics: Spring 2025 Fiction

»A book I never wanted to write.«

How does war change pictures? How does it change how we see? How does it change the people who live through it or those who observe it? With her photo columns – published in the newspaper between February 2022 and autumn 2024 – Katja Petrowskaja has unintentionally written a chronicle of the war in Ukraine.

It begins on the eve of...

A state is founded, like all states, for eternity, but disappears after forty years, almost without a trace. Are the people who once lived there condemned to oblivion, their dreams just a brief...

Who do you turn to when you're a terminally ill former mafioso who wants to rearrange your affairs and needs more than just a little help on your trip through Germany? Or if you're an American tycoon trying to track down the murderer of your daughter, who died in Berlin under mysterious circumstances? In these kinds of cases, you’d better call Carl. In years gone by, Carl ran the legendary...

White Nights is the debut work of prose by acclaimed Polish poet Urszula Honek. At first glance, the volume is made up of standalone short stories about the tragedies and misfortunes that...

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...

A remote holiday house on the French Atlantic coast. This is where Elena wants to spend three relaxing weeks with her children. Her husband has stayed behind in Germany – their marriage has...

In precise and piercing language, Yannic Biao Federer tells of the loss of his son, of saying goodbye and care work, of parenthood and love. I See You Everywhere, Forever is a document of...

Images of flight, dispossession, and injury, spanning millennia, in history and myth: Eurydice, frantically fleeing from a god that is stalking her, fails to notice the serpent and dies from its poisonous bite. Landless cottagers in northern Scotland, relocated to less fertile land or forced to emigrate. A young German nobelwoman, educated and gifted, resists the »given«, the »morals of...

»I see the lifeless body of a young woman. The colours of an intensive care unit, pale blue, turquoise-green, ice-grey. Blood stuck to her ear. Instagram conceals nothing. Regardless of how many...

»The trams haven’t been running since February.« Time and again, we encounter moments of calm in this city haunted by the spectre of war. People meet up in places that are still more or less...

Anselm Kiefer and Alexander Kluge have been friends for many years – and they share an aesthetic and analytical interest in the deeply human possibility of reliability. But what is reliability?...

»Every true and luminous short story also casts a novel-length shadow”, Ralf Rothmann once wrote, and The Museum of Solitude provides the proof for this assertion. Whether he’s talking about the “shindig” held by a young boy who consoles his crying brother while their parents are away or about a lecturer who takes her mother to a nursing home with strange scratch marks on the doors,...

On the way back to his little shack on a vineyard near the Black Forest, the narrator receives a phone call that turns his world upside down. His partner Ina has had a serious accident while freediving. She is placed in an induced coma, and nobody knows whether she has suffered brain damage, whether she will ever wake up again at all. In the days that follow, he is terrified that she won’t...

A young girl stands in front of her swimming teacher and begs to finally be put in the advanced group. Yet she can hardly swim at all without help. Her teacher is merciless, the girl descends into despair.

Thirty years later, Heike Geißler is grown up but still despairing – but she's determined to face up to this feeling. What is wrong – with gender roles, heroism, militarisation?...

Number 36 and 37, they lived here side by side for years. As a child, she would play table tennis on the glass-topped table in her grandparents’ apartment. As an adult, she eventually has to clear...