New Literature from Austria

Incentives - New Literature from Austria

readme.cc provides multilingual access to the latest Austrian literature. In collaboration with the Literaturhaus in Vienna the reading forum offers the latest insights about literature published in Austria.

Literary journalists and researchers introduce current new publications; reading samples allow for a closer look at the texts; short portraits of the authors complement the picture.

The range of information is currently available in five languages: German, English, French, Czech and Hungarian.

The Project "Incentives" targets at the internationalization of Austrian literature, respectively the translation of current texts.

Project realization: the Office of Documentation of Contemporary Austrian Literature (reviews, author’s portraits) – The Association of Translators (translations) – readme.cc (infrastructure).

 

http://www.literaturhaus.at

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Die Tiere von Paris Schreiner, Margit

"You write on a board that you have taken from a building site, sitting up in bed, while your husband works at his desk." (p. 8) That is how Die Tiere von Paris (The Animals of ...

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Geld! Rosei, Peter

Peter Rosei has written – in a highly condensed form – a Viennese social novel which has only marginally to do with the finance industry, but which nevertheless focuses on money. This is ...

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Die Voest-Kinder Reichart, Elisabeth

Voest, Austria’s most important industrial company, developed from the Hermann Göring Steelworks. The history of this plant has long since been researched by historians, and there have also ...

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Jáchymov Haslinger, Josef

"Jáchymov" is a triangular story. The angles – in a well constructed network of tensions kept up to the very last page of the book – are formed by Bohumil Modrý, Blanka Modra and ...

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Engel des Vergessens Haderlap, Maja

Maja Haderlap, who won the Bachmann Prize in 2011, has returned to her Carinthian home – to be precise to her Slovene village of Lepena, with her first novel, Engel des Vergessens (Angel of ...

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Stillbach oder Die Sehnsucht Gruber, Sabine

Clara is on the way to Rome, in order to sort out the personal effects of her friend Ines, who has died suddenly. They were both born in the (fictitious) village of Stillbach in South Tyrol, and ...

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Sommer wie Winter Taschler, Judith W.

Judith W. Taschler’s ”Sommer wie Winter” (Like Summer like Winter) may be her first novel, but it is nevertheless a mature book as regards both style and narrative technique. The author ...

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Der Platz des Hundes Weidenholzer, Anna

Anna Weidenholzer’s eight stories are loosely connected by their characters; the author lets her characteristically laconic style play over the everyday lives of the characters, who have been ...

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Kein einziger Tag Stift, Linda

The Austrian biotope always seems to have the right degree of dampness for ominous cases of symbiosis. Anyone who wants to be spared the need to look at the political and media scenes for some ...

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Wenn Kinder Steine ins Wasser werfen Bayer, Xaver

Endless stream of thought Xaver Bayer rebels against the full stop A man is waiting at Brussels Airport for his flight to leave. Never mind the gate. Naturally he passes the waiting ...

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Eigenleben oder wie schreibt man eine Novelle Aigner, Christoph Wilhelm

Marina di Cecina in winter. A seaside resort without visitors, the houses by the beach locked and barricaded, in mothballs until the next season. Everything cold and damp, poorly heated or shut. ...

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Rauchernovelle Dahimène, Adelheid

As a non-smoker one comes to Rauchernovelle (Smoker’s Story) with mixed feelings. There is a woman sitting a train and complaining that she is forbidden to smoke. Should one feel sympathy here? ...

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Herznovelle Rabinowich, Julya

Heart operations are not infrequently traumatic experiences which leave deep psychological scars. In Julya Rabinowich’s Herznovelle (Heart Story) it is, though, a love trauma which the ...

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Von Dschalalabad nach Bad Schallerbach Einzinger, Erwin

The rather tired humour of the echoing syllables in the title is already an example of the madcap toing and froing and toing that characterizes Erwin Einzinger’s writing. Two little arrows ...

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Fremdes Land Sautner, Thomas

In the tradition of literary dystopias such as George Orwell’s 1984 or Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Thomas Sautner bitingly describes a fictitious society in an unspecified location in ...

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Familie Salzmann Hackl, Erich

While literature often claims to show how the family history of an individual inevitably determines his fate, Erich Hackl keeps to real events, which are tragic enough and which he supplements ...

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Schwester der Angst Mischkulnig, Lydia

It is the story of an obsession, which Lydia Mischkulnig describes with an absolutely pathological love of detail in her new novel Schwestern der Angst (Sisters of Fear). Renate and Marie are ...

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Andernorts Rabinovici, Doron

Doron Rabinovici was born in Tel Aviv and moved to Vienna at the age of three. What he writes has always been shaped by the tension between his life in Austria and his vital interest in Israel. ...

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Bewegungsmelder Ballhausen, Thomas

"Don't cry - work!" This instruction was chosen by the author Rainald Goetz as the subtitle for his early novel, Irre (Mad). Hence the underlying theme of the work: existential ...

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Kopf aus den Wolken Cerha, Ruth

“Traveling means going away, Majana said, but upon our arrival in New York, on a street corner in Midtown Manhattan, I saw something else in her eyes and it made me afraid. Traveling also means ...

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Die ganze Wahrheit Gstrein, Norbert

'Truth is something relative. And the whole truth all the more so. There are any number of versions of it. Some of them are protected by lawyers, others by priests.' Norbert Gstrein’s latest ...

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Populäre Panoramen I Falkner, Brigitta

In "Populäre Panoramen I" (Popular Panoramas I) Brigitta Falkner offers as an author the twofold pleasure of reading and looking. Each double page is, as it were, a diptych of text and ...

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Anleitung zum Fest Meschik, Lukas

Following his debut novel Jetzt die Sirenen (Now the Sirens), the young Viennese author Lukas Meschik has again proven his talent with his impressive and confident use of language in Anleitung zum ...

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Das Matratzenhaus Hochgatterer, Paulus

Many of the inhabitants of Paulus Hochgatterer’s fictive town Furth am See have grounds for revenge. Bad things happen and have happened there: Children disappear, are beaten, disowned, and ...

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Alles über Sally Geiger, Arno

If anyone ever thought Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary was the last word on the everyday horrors of bourgeois marriage, they were very wrong. Marriage dramas are still able to captivate and ...

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Fütter mich Travnicek, Cornelia

She thought of the children's astonishment that it was enough to touch one of the large granite stones with a finger. With a child’s hand. And everything began to sway. The world of the ...

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Das Schöne und das Notwendige Grill, Andrea

Finzens and Fiat make up an all-male household that stands on wobbly financial legs; while Finzens, who is from Bulgaria, at least has a steady income – his job is to keep the peace in the ...

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Giftige Kleider Scholl, Sabine

In freezing February, Sabine Scholl presents a mystery that takes place in summer, and whose main protagonist, Gina Sonnenfels, comes from Vienna, lives in Berlin, and has “a good nose for the ...

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Von den Himmeln Petricek, Gabriele

The three novellas in Von den Himmel compose a literary “triptych” on the theme of fault and failure. Taking the art history term for a three-paneled (altar) picture literally, we can ...

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Das Leben der Wünsche Glavinic, Thomas

Thomas Glavinic specializes in declines. His protagonists fight the gravity of all earthly ramblings; they grapple with apathy, alcohol, and demoralization. His early novels often were peopled by ...

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