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Clemens Setz took the Leipzig Book Prize for fiction two weeks ago with his story collection, Die Liebe zur Zeit des Mahlstädter Kindes (Suhrkamp, 2011). The excellent vid-lit source zehnSeiten, which puts an author at a table for a 10-page reading from his/her work, has just released a clip of Setz reading from the stories. Enjoy!

In re-cataloging titles from our stacks, we recently came across a work whose title page and CIP represent a chapter of German-American publishing history in themselves. In 1945 Pantheon Books published Adalbert Stifter’s Bergkristall as Rock Crystal, in a translation by Elizabeth Mayer and Marianne Moore. Marianne Moore is the well-known American poet, of course, but Elizabeth Mayer has quite an interesting story herself. The title page also acknowledges illustrations by Josef Scharl. Scharl was a German Expressionist painter and graphic artist, whose work is still, as it was during his lifetime, represented by Galerie Nierendorf.

The story continues on the CIP page, with the address of Pantheon Books, Inc., 41 Washington Square, New York 12, NY, a few blocks north of the Goethe-Institut New York. Founded in 1942 by Kurt and Helen Wolff, who were joined a year later by Jacques Schiffrin, Pantheon Books lived up to its name, introducing what indeed became a pantheon of international authors to American readers. Beneath Pantheon’s address in the CIP information comes the phrase, “Designed by Stefan Salter”. Salter, brother of the better-known book designer Georg Salter, found his first job after emigrating to New York from Germany in 1928 at H. Wolff Book Manufacturing Co. (apparently no relation to the Wolffs).

A new edition of Rock Crystal, published in 2008 by New York Review Books, enriches the original edition with the addition of an introduction by W.H. Auden, which was first published as a review in The New York Times Book Review in 1945. Auden, as it turns out, was a great friend of translator Elizabeth Mayer.

You'll find both editions of Rock Crystal in the Goethe-Institut New York library.

To author Georg Klein, popular literary genres are something to be embraced, even as he twists their arms until they cry Onkel! In his novels to date, Klein has taken on the horror, detective, science fiction, and medical genres, and with his Leipzig Book Prize-winning latest novel, Roman unserer Kindheit (Rowohlt, 2009), he adds the Kinderbandenbuch genre, best represented by Enid Blyton. Blyton, a British author beloved by German readers, wrote a series of "five friends" books over three decades beginning in the forties, and as one reviewer of Roman unserer Kindheit put it, Klein "tells an 'eight friends' story with a seriousness as if for the first time."

It's the early 60s, and though the eight children of the novel were born in the fifties and live in a housing complex called the Neue Siedlung, the war is never far away, personified by local veterans such as "the man without a face," a blind accordion player and the legless Commander Silver. A nameless narrator relates a summer in the lives of "der ältere Bruder", his joke-addicted younger twin brothers and five of their decidedly idiosyncratic friends, including die schicke Sibylle and her little sister, a child who gives the word Gör a whole new meaning. When the Kiki-Mann, a mute parakeet breeder and neighbor, announces that a Siedlung child will die that summer, the stage is set for a showdown between the children and the demonic forces of the Bärenkeller, a once popular, now deserted local spot with its subterranean secrets.

Klein is equally adept at portraying the complex lives of the children's parents as he is the quasi-idyllic, quasi-horrifying summer of the eight inventive friends. "Das Kinderbandenbuch verspricht Geborgenehit im Kollektiv," the author has stated, and the security this band of children finds among themselves, reflected in the novel's title, is beautifully rendered in this fictionalized look back by one of Germany's finest writers.

You'll find Roman unserer Kindheit, along with other Georg Klein titles, in our library.

The emigrant experience of those fleeing Hitler's Germany is documented in a great many non-fiction titles and, increasingly, in novels, ranging from Hans Sahl's classic Die Wenigen und die Vielen (S. Fischer, 1959) to recent titles such as Klaus Modick's Die Schatten der Ideen (Eichborn, 2008) and Michael Lentz's Pazifik Exil (S. Fischer, 2007). Most novelists, including these three, focus on writers and artists who came to America.

But this focus shifts radically with Shanghai fern von wo (Jung und Jung, 2008), by award-winning poet, essayist, and short-story writer Ursula Krechel. Shanghai has not loomed large in histories of the German émigrés, and Krechel fills in this missing link with a depiction of the (largely) Jewish community that swelled Shanghai’s foreign population between 1938 and 1948. Her novel, based on research carried out over many years, gives readers a pungent impression of the sights, smells, heat and humidity of a city totally foreign to the refugees in every sense of the word. Mixing fictional with real-life figures, such as bookseller Ludwig Lazarus, art historian Lothar Brieger, and Franziska Tausig, a Viennese housewife who, surviving as a cook at a Chinese restaurant, is said to have invented the spring roll, Krechel makes full use of her linguistic gifts, in a novel that brings to life this amazing chapter in German history.

Sascha is 17 and tough as nails. She lives in a high-rise complex in western Germany with other Russian immigrants and has two dreams in life: to kill her stepfather Vadim and to write a book about her mother. Russian-born author Alina Bronsky pulls out the stops with these basics and then spends the remainder of this 286-page novel filling in the story of Sascha and her younger siblings, ferocious toddler Alissa and traumatized Anton. When Sascha reads in a paper that Vadim is to be released from prison, she pays a visit to the newspaper's offices, where she encounters a well-respected journalist who will change the course of her life.

The Scherbenpark, or Broken-Glass Park, of the title is the scene of one of the book's more frightening episodes. But it also could be understood as a metaphor for Sascha's life, shattered as it is.
Readers of this fast-paced, funny and sad debut will be left waiting to see what direction its young author will take next.