Readings in the Shed
Blurbs

From the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2009, The Passport is a beautiful, haunting novel whose subject is a German village in Romania caught between the stifling hopelessness of Ceausescu's dictatorship and the glittering temptations of the West. Stories from the past are woven together with the problems Windisch, the village miller, faces after he applies for permission to migrate to West Germany. Herta Müller describes with poetic attention the dreams and superstitions, conflicts and oppression of a forgotten region, the Banat, in the Danube Plain. In sparse, lyrical language, Herta Müller captures the forlorn plight of a trapped people. This edition is translated by Martin Chalmers, with a new foreword by Paul Bailey.

The Austrian playwright, novelist and poet Thomas Bernhard is acknowledged as among the major writers of our time.The seven stories in this collection capture Bernhard’s distinct darkly comic voice and vision—often compared to Kafka and Musil—commenting on a corrupted world.

It was the post world war era. Ingeborg's voice was at the brink of bursting upon German literature. Paul, a survivor of a labour camp, had published Death Fugue, one of the most important poems of the Holocaust. Perhaps it was their stark different backgrounds. Perhaps it was their shared ideologies. Or, perhaps love needed no reason. Correspondence by Ingeborg Bachmann & Paul Celan celebrates a love that transcended separation, changed form and lived on.

Described as an answer to or at least an echo of Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape?, Till Day You Do Part Or A Question of Light, by esteemed Austrian playwright and novelist Peter Handke, is a monologue delivered by the “she” in Beckett’s play. It is Handke at his best, evidencing the great skill, psychological acumen, and vision for which his work has been celebrated.

After years on the job, police detective Jakob Franck has retired. Finally, the dead-with all their mysteries-will no longer have any claim on him. Or so he thinks. On a cold autumn afternoon, a case he thought he'd long put behind him returns to his life-and turns it upside down...


 

An old man close to death. A suspicious stranger on the stairs. The sounds of the endless night unsettle him, triggering images, questions and memories - the impressions of the day just past and his life. The old man wracks his brain over why he inherited the building he now lives in, why he left the city that was his home for so long: Is he here voluntarily? What brought the stranger here?

The Lectures on Poetics Series at the University of Frankfurt VI has hosted many illustrious speakers at its lectern, including Ingeborg Bachmann, Theodor Adorno, and Heinrich Böll. At the beginning of 2007, Urs Widmer—described by the Independent as ‘one of the living greats of Swiss literature’—spoke to more than twelve hundred students and enthusiasts, sharing the sum of his understandings of poets and their timeless creations.

During a 1960 interview, East German writer Christa Wolf was asked a curious question: would she describe in detail what she did on September 27th? Fascinated by considering the significance of a single day over many years, Wolf began keeping a detailed diary of September 27th, a practice which she carried on for more than fifty years until her death in 2011.