Featured Topics: Spring 2026 Fiction

Even as a child, Adalina loved the rattling sound of the Bibliomotocarro – the little library on wheels that Maestro La Cava would bring to her tiny Italian mountain village, brimming with stories. Years later, now a writer herself, she returns home and stumbles across the abandoned bookmobile in a garage. But there is no sign of the old maestro.

When Adalina learns that the book tours...

In Application for a Job as a Human Being, Bejamin Maack recounts his daily life with depression. He writes about how confusing and difficult it is to live with this illness, and to love – his children, his girlfriend, himself. And how, time and again, he still manages. A disarmingly honest and direct and sometimes humorous depression diary.

When Benjamin Maack suffers another...

What if it were possible to cool the Earth, but the sky would forever lose its blue? Hannah is working for an exhibition that is supposed to collect memories of this blue shortly before a global geo-engineering process will take place. Sulphur particles will be launched into the stratosphere, changing the way that sunlight is refracted. Seas and rivers will fade, and the Blue Planet will be...

»I write you – / into the world, until you’ve returned / by the spectral force of the word« writes Nelly Sachs in one of the poems that Josef Winkler quotes in his new novel, in which he writes his...

Bernhard is 70, divorced, childless, and ever since he retired, he’s felt like there is something missing from his life. A new relationship? A hobby? Maybe volunteering? Nothing seems to fit together. But then he receives an invitation to Salerno – that place on the Italian coast where he’d spend a few months all those decades ago, and which at the time had seemed to promise a different life....

The old miller bequeaths his mill to his first-born son, the second gets the donkey. For the youngest son, the only thing left is the cat who was tasked with catching the mice around the house. What’s he supposed to do with a cat? And then the cat asked for a pair of brand-new boots, that the miller’s son has made with his last few coins. He would have never dreamt that the cat would make him so...

Frustrated at being a small cog in a big wheel, Franz Fiala makes a »life decision« and quits his job at the European Commission. When he visits his mother in Vienna for her 89th birthday, however,...

Berlin, today. A young man is lying dead under the Caprivi Bridge in Charlottenburg – head shot, no papers, no witnesses. Detective Nihal Khigarian has only just gotten back from Hamburg, bruised up...

»Poems«, writes Michael Krüger in his afterword, »are the result of a life, of a particular experience, of an accumulation of impressions. When I look back upon the years in which these poems emerged, three experiences come to the fore that probably had the strongest impact on them: the rural setting in which I’ve been living for years, the death of my nearest and dearest friends – and the...

It’s the end of the year. The world seems to be standing still, waiting for Christmas. Even the usually bustling streets of Hamburg’s St. Pauli have been transformed by twinkling lights and golden angels. But despite all the cozy glittering and glowing, someone seems to have it in for the homeless people in the neighbourhood. And if there's one thing prosecutor Chastity Riley has absolutely no...

After this holiday, the plan is that a perfectly matured embryo will be implanted in Linn’s uterus, and she will finally realise her dream of being pregnant. She and her partner Matze have been...

»All she'd done was fall in love. Is that supposed to be a crime or something?«

Charlie, a PhD candidate in mathematics, is sitting on the U-Bahn with a black eye googling »bad...

In a red Audi A6, our hero sets out on a trip from Austria to Germany to become the federal chancellor. He pauses at autobahn rest stops and in Penny parking lots, ends up at left-wing and right-wing protests, parks in front of the Bundestag, at a circus ground, and ends up in a police interrogation room. On the different legs of his journey, he encounters bizarre characters that suggest an...

»Otchanganarriva, late August

My dear Masahlena, I’m not allowed to use the word Otchanganarriva so much anymore. Otchanganarriva. Otchanganarriva. Otchanganarriva. Otchanganarriva. Now I feel better. We have to act as if we are very close to one another within a family, Masahlena. Are you on something. Your pupils are as big as oversized pupils. You’re freezing. Or is that me. I can’t...

»His sense of justice made him into a robber and a murderer.« That’s how Heinrich von Kleist describes the horse dealer Michael Kohlhaas in his eponymous novella, a man who goes on a bloody rampage of revenge after suffering an act of injustice. Two hundred years later, his actions serve as inspiration and instruction for Michaela Kohlhaas: an aggrieved assistant manager of a cemetery. Driven by...

The dramaturg who has just taken up one of the most esteemed positions at the Serbian National Theatre in Belgrade, namely head of the acting department, is young. Just 30 years of age. The National Theatre, on the other hand, is anything but young. With 150 years of tradition behind it, it is a rather conservative emblem of a country that itself remains rather conservative.

This debut...

Lviv, 1941. Sixteen-year-old Nelka is picked up by soldiers and taken west with a large number of other women and girls. They end up on an estate in northern Germany, where they are forced to carry out hard labour. Nelka’s father had taught her about fruit-growing early on, and even as a little girl, she had helped him to graft his apple trees. Thanks to this knowledge, she is initially able to...

Lis Castrop is a world-class chef. After years working at a famous London fine-dining temple, she can’t say no to an offer that seems too good to be true: The billionaire Harman family want to employ her and her daughter Cosima to work exclusively in their opulent residence in Davos, in the Swiss Alps. But on New Year’s Eve, the festivities turn into a nightmare.After the dinner, Mr and Mrs...

A straight volume of poetry from the most poetry-sceptical poet writing in German today. Rare goods! Read as bollards, these standing texts are embedded in a botanical substrate that was deposited in 2009: an innovative process of text recycling that unites solidity with conceptual fecundity. Bollards: Idylls releases pastoral scenes of the kind collected by Theocritus into contemporary...