Rightslist

»Elsa Koester shows how fascism takes root today. Her book hums with energy, pulling you in. It doesn’t explain why you have to get involved, it makes you feel it. That’s painful, but necessary to grasp the danger.« Daniel Schulz, Author and Journalist

Nana has never been to Saxony before. But now there’s an election coming up, and she’s headed to a town on the German state’s distant edge, the land of wolves, to stop a far-right candidate from becoming mayor.

Nana arrives in Grenzlitz, a town on the outskirts of Saxony, that is heated by the election campaign, filled with returning women, entrepreneurs, and motherless East Germans who were never integrated into this republic by their parents. As a campaign coach, she aims to support Katja Stötzel, the candidate for the eco-progressive Greens. But she’s kept at arm’s length. Instead, she finds understanding with Falk Schlosser, a man from the far-right. In the former East Germany, Nana reconnects with the anger and despair she’s buried for years, frustrated by a society that’s pushed her to the margins. As tensions escalate and candidate Katja faces threats, and everything begins to spiral out of control, Nana must make a choice: Whose side is she really on? Who truly stands for humanity?

In the Land of Wolves is a raw, authentic portrayal of rising fascism in a small town in Eastern Germany. It’s less about party politics and more about the personal battles for recognition and hope, where the wounds of the past thirty years – bitterness, frustration, and hypocrisy – become weapons.

Elsa Koester was born in Berlin in 1984 to a French Pied-Noir mother with a Tunisian colonial background and a North German father with a history of American emigration. She still lives in Berlin, working as a political journalist and Deputy Editor-in-Chief for the weekly newspaper »Der Freitag«. Revived debates on colonialism, identity, and homeland inspired her successful debut novel Couscous mit Zimt (FVA, 2020), where she drew from her diverse cultural identity and experience as both a journalist and activist.

»Laura Vogt vividly, and through shifting perspectives, explores what freedom and dependency can mean in the 21st century. The Reclining Woman is a nuanced, true-to-life novel about life choices, love, and friendship. The Swiss author allows her characters space to grow and evolve.« Martina Läubli, NZZ Books on Sunday

What does freedom mean? What about responsibility? What shapes us, and what do we hope to pass on to others? In her third novel, Laura Vogt delves deeply into the emotional lives of her characters – women in their thirties – and shows us their strengths and weaknesses, their disappointments and hopes. This is a vibrant, life-affirming novel that vividly illustrates how individualism, motherhood, and self-determination must continually be renegotiated.

Romi, short for Romina, is expecting her second child, and recently a second man has also arrived in her life. Szibilla finds the idea of bringing children into the world fundamentally irresponsible, and to her, Romi’s polyamory is just another way to become even more dependent on men. What binds them together is their best friend, Nora. But Nora escapes to her mother’s house in the Swiss Rhine Valley with her young daughter, lays right down in bed, and goes silent. Baffled, Romi and Szibilla travel to visit her, checking into a cheap wellness hotel nearby. While Romi worries about Nora, Szibilla believes this break is exactly what Nora needs to reconnect with herself. Over five days of heated discussions about life choices, the rift between Romi and Szibilla deepens – until Nora finally breaks her silence.

Laura Vogt, born in 1989 in Teufen, Switzerland, studied cultural studies in Lucerne and literary writing in Biel. Her debut novel, So einfach war es also zu gehen (2016), earned her invitations to the Solothurn Literature Days and PROSANOVA – Festival for Young Literature. In 2020, her second novel, Was uns betrifft, was translated into English. In addition to prose, she also writes poetry, plays, and journalistic texts, and works as a live interpreter and mentor. She lives with her family in eastern Switzerland.

»A suspenseful and highly psychological read, it paints portraits of three relationships between women of different generations, examining themes of female
desire, alienation and social expectation. (…) While comparisons could be drawn with Dorothy Bussy and Michelle Tea, Landfried is a distinctive new voice in German literature. Relatable, nuanced and compelling, ›Pasteurgasse 4, täglich‹ offers a fresh and timely addition
to the growing body of queer narratives.« New Books in German
 
»Andrea Landfried's narratively and stylistically powerful recordings of relationships – an encounter with love as a feverish, tumbling search for oneself, haunting, confounding, touching.« Bernhard Schlink
 
 
A young singer in Vienna falls in love with Ruth, a married photographer. Every day, before Ruth picks up her daughter from school, they share exactly two-and-a-half hours together, for two years. At the beginning, Ruth had warned her: the only and at the same time most important thing she could promise her was that she would not deceive her.
 
A woman accompanies her husband on his research fellowship in California. There she meets the much older Angela. Despite the many years and kilometers that separate them, a fragile erotic closeness develops between them.
 
Sarah falls in love with her psychotherapist. As Sarah's behavior becomes more and more obsessive, her therapist has her committed against her will, and a true psychiatric journey to hell begins. During a visit to the sanatorium, she is told, »And now you're going to have a great time.«
 
Andrea Landfried portrays three variations of female desire, each simmering with rebellion against social constraints, accepted psychological patterns, and role expectations. These women's longing to be truly seen and recognized triumphs again and again over fears of falling outside the norms and being socially ostracized. They take the risk of revealing themselves and feeling everything – one of the greatest risks one can take.
 
 
Andrea Landfried, born in 1976, lives with her children in Heidelberg. She studied law in Berlin and Oxford, among other places, and is currently the head of a foundation.

»No punk she knew would have tolerated that. Never. There had been a code of honor in the scene, despite everything. Red lines uncrossed. Jackass and Butt-Head: always. Nazis and child molesters: never.«
 
A group of aging punks get caught up in their past – a fast-paced rocking-rollercoaster of a novel, accompanied by the soundtrack of a vibrant youth movement
 
The smell of stage smoke and sweat, booming bass, glaring neon lights and squatted houses – Bey misses all of that deeply. Before the birth of her son, the former bassist of an avant-garde punk band couldn’t have imagined living a traditional, bourgeois life – now she’s stuck on the outskirts of Amsterdam, surrounded by well-to-do mothers and no late-adolescent excesses in sight. Suddenly, the arrival of a chalk-white envelope throws her daily routine out of step: her ex-boyfriend Iggy has died. Bey sets off to Berlin for the funeral, where she finds an old audio recording among Iggy’s belongings that makes her doubt the circumstances of his death. Her investigations are met with resistance from the rest of the old punks who knew him, but lead nonetheless to incriminating evidence. When Karina, Bey’s missing nemesis, unexpectedly appears on the scene, a breathless race for cassette tape begins and a monstrous truth is revealed that shatters everything Bey and her old friends ever believed.
 
Yasmin Sibai’s debut novel takes place in the dark basement clubs of the nineties and secret hacker salons of the two-thousands; it roams through gentrified urban landscapes and penetrates into the black heart of a lively subculture, venting its anger with hard beats towards post-war conservatism, capitalism and commerce. In »PUNKED«, Sibai lets a utopia implode and puts her protagonist on the trail of a criminal case that sheds new light on her punk past.
 

Yasmin Sibai was born in northern Germany in 1976 and has since moved thirty-two times. In the eighties and nineties of the last millennium she was the singer and frontwoman of a rather insignificant avant-garde punk band, with whom she toured the smallest bars and clubs in the world for months. She has lived in Abu Dhabi, Tokyo, New York and Amsterdam, worked as an organic farmer, truck driver, freelance architect, DJane and artist. She lives with her family in Frankfurt a/M and has no plans to move in the near future.
 

Awarded the Robert Gernhardt Prize and the Licher Literature Prize

In ›Old Girls‹, Julia Wolf lets three generations of women have their say – and sketches a panorama of female life in the Federal Republic that hasn’t been seen before in contemporary German literature.
 

»Julia Wolf’s ›Old Girls‹ resists easy categorisation and refuses to jump on any contemporary literary bandwagons. Its mixture of different literary modes is accessible, inventive and often amusing. Wolf has a knack for hitting all the right generational notes while developing distinct characters and friendships.« New Books in German

»›Old Girls‹ has everything you could want from a contemporary German-language novel: The failure of a petty-bourgeois family, silence, and the experiences of powerlessness in German post-war history, all told as a kaleidoscopic exploration of female subjectivity. Julia Wolf writes a history of consciousness, creating a picture of the postwar milieu that has not been seen before.« Laudatio for the Robert Gernhardt Prize

It's always the daughters who ask! The three ›girls from East Prussia‹, Anni, Else and Hannelore, are asked to model for a photography campaign for their senior citizens’ residence. While Germany's Next Topmodel plays on television, these three women in their mid-nineties negotiate what they want to say about their lives – and what not.

In the car on the way to Poland, Gudrun sends a voice message. She wants her niece to know about her grandmother’s death. But she digresses, talks about her escape at the end of the war, her childhood in the 1950s. Suddenly it becomes clear: she has something she wants to confess.

Undine, Jenny and Thao spend a weekend in Berlin before Jenny has her first child. Along with memories of their childhood and youth in the 1980s and 1990s, social differences come to light again. As they reevaluate their life choices, the contractions begin.

Written in three parts – »Marjellchen,« »New Home, Old House« and »MILF« – Julia Wolf portrays three generations of women, tracing the wounds, values, and experiences of wartime. With this novel, she contributes an important narrative of female subjectivity to German post-war history, opening our eyes to where we come from, where we are going, what we should take with us, and what we should let go.

Julia Wolf is an author and translator. Her debut »Alles ist Jetzt« (FVA 2015) was followed by the novel »Walter Nowak bleibt liegen« (FVA 2017), which won the 3sat Prize and the Nicolas Born Debut Prize, and was nominated for the German Book Prize 2017. She received the Robert Gernhardt Prize and the Licher Literature Prize for »Old Girls«. As part of the author collective »Writing with CARE/RAGE,« Julia Wolf has worked on the topic of care work and artistic production. She lives with her family in Leipzig.

»Atmospherically dense like Marguerite Duras.« DIE ZEIT, reviewing ›Iva Breaths‹

»Her art is political. The fact is: she has something to say, and say it she does it. Amanda Lasker-Berlin is a name to remember.« MDR, reviewing ›Elijah’s Song‹

The skin of ten-year-old Spes is as sensitive as a butterfly’s wing. When will she throw off her gauze cocoon and finally be able to fly?

Mirjam travels to a country in upheaval. How do you tell a story when everything is in ruins?

Paul is on the run from his photo, plastered on front pages. It's only an accusation, but what is the truth?

Achura fears a catastrophe, the end of her political career. But would she take back what she said?

Spes, Mirjam, Paul and Achura are each at a turning point. How do you reinvent yourself without losing yourself? Can enough strength be found for a utopia, for a new beginning? Amanda Lasker-Berlin tells the story of four characters, trying to break free from classifications and overcome a crisis. Rapidly intercut perspectives, colliding points of view and voices form together an energy that gathers its power with each page. »Spes Means Hope« is a novel that is bursting with our present moment, and one that widens our view of what is important.

Amanda Lasker-Berlin, born in Essen in 1994, studied fine arts at the Bauhaus University in Weimar and studied stage direction at the Akademie für Darstellende Kunst Baden-Württemberg in Ludwigsburg, where she lead a production of Herta Müller’s »Atemschaukel« Her drama ICH, WUNDERWERK AND HOW MUCH I LOVE DISTURBING CONTENT premiered in 2021 as part of the Autor:innentheatertage at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin and was awarded the Hermann Sudermann Prize. Her first novel »Elijas Lied« (FVA, 2020) was awarded the debut prize at lit.COLOGNE, followed by the novel »Iva Breathes« at FVA in 2021. She lives in Frankfurt am Main.

»Behind every story is a second story that must be told before it can begin to exist.«

»Marie-Alice Schultz writes with great subtlety and arresting accuracy about disappearances. In her crystal-clear view of what is lost and what is added, one always recognizes oneself.« Isabelle Lehn

What happens when someone leaves – but then returns after seven years? Unannounced, Ben bursts back into Pia’s life, and the lives of Vinz, and of Janis, who is his son. Now, suddenly, Janis has two fathers and Pia finds herself wondering why it is that only others can come and go as they wish. Marie-Alice, the narrator, learns the news of her Viennese friends while in Hamburg. There was briefly something with Vinz before, but now there is a new triangle. Marie-Alice is herself a writer and currently in a liminal place: between projects, between plans for the future and the memories of her French mother, who many years ago ate half an apple before she suddenly died. Increasingly, Marie-Alice wonders just what family is, and how responsibility, inheritance, happiness, and identity relate to each other. She begins thinking her way into the lives of her Viennese friends, until something that no one had expected occurs, and one piece of the triangle changes sides.

In »The Half Apple«, Marie-Alice Schultz tells a story of unusual family arrangements and modern life choices, with a playful tone of radical self-interrogation. The novel’s way of reversing the roles and points of view of its characters and weaving them into an exciting plot reveals extraordinary literary skill. The author’s voice is reminiscent of Rachel Cusk's or Lisa Halliday's indirect self-examinations, but reveals how one can sometimes only find oneself in a roundabout way, in a style all her own.

Marie-Alice Schultz was born in Hamburg in 1980. She studied theater and German language and literature in Berlin, and fine arts in Vienna. In 2016, received a scholarship to the Jürgen Ponto Foundation’s writing workshop, and she was a participant in the 20th Klagenfurt Literature Course. For her 2019 debut novel »Mikadowälder«, she was awarded a literature prize by the city of Hamburg. In 2021, she received a working fellowship at the Roger Willemsen Foundation's artist’s house. She lives in Hamburg.

»It was too late, he had already let him share his thoughts. He could not get away from them, they created an unrest in him, made something deep inside him move, like a surgically precise surface damage and the echo of a pain; an echo that grew louder in the emptiness of the house and forced him to listen, amid silence, effective as the pause of a symphony.«

As the head of Vienna’s Astronomy Institute, Marty's life revolves around the vastness of the universe. He gladly allows it to push the reality of his own life aside; the fact that his wife Marlene is already secretly making completely different plans for the future, and that his daughter is beginning to question her gender, remains hidden from him. At a conference he meets the psychoanalyst Steindorfer, who asks him why it is man actually knows more about distant planets than about his own consciousness, and who then gives him a manuscript he has been writing, the reading of which deeply disturbs Marty.
Zoë Jenny's long-awaited new novel is brimming with an unsettling atmosphere. The silent, distant stars of the galaxy seem at great odds with the ominous and ever-more-rapidly unfolding events on Earth. Jenny writes of artificial intelligence and the question of what consciousness is; of gender reassignment, personal freedom, a lack of alternatives, climate crisis, light pollution, and more, moving along the edges of a recognizable reality in the midst of our stellar chaos.

»Zoë Jenny offers up strong, poetic images like wondrous, melancholic Instagram photos. She is undoubtedly a master of the short form.« MISSY MAGAZINE on »Latest Tomorrow« (»Spätestens morgen«)

»Omission is an art, and Zoë Jenny masters it in these terse, precisely condensed stories. Her narration is casual, stylistically appropriate, and practically perfect. The tone is simple, matter-of-fact and it touches and resonates.« SRF 2 on »Latest Tomorrow« (»Spätestens morgen«)

Zoë Jenny was born in Basel in 1974. Her first novel »The Pollen Room« (»Das Blütenstaubzimmer«, FVA, 1997) was a global bestseller translated into 27 languages, and awarded the 3sat scholarship, the Jürgen Ponto Foundation Literature Prize, and the aspekte Literature Prize. Frankfurter Verlagsanstalt also published her novels »Der Ruf des Muschelhorns« (2000) and »Das Portrait« (2007), as well as her short stories »Spätestens morgen« (2013). She lives near Vienna.

The new novel by the internationally bestselling author of »The Eighth Life (For Brilka)«

Publishing date: 25th February 2022

Sold to: Czech Republic (HOST), Denmark (Gutkind), Georgia (Intelekti), France (Gallimard), Italy (Marsilio), Lithuania (Alma Littera), Netherlands (Meridiaan), Norway (Aschehoug), Poland (Otwarte), Slovakia (Inaque), Spain & Latin America (Alfaguara), Sweden (it-lit), US & UK (HarperVia), Romania (Editura Trei)
 

»Lack Of Light« is the story of four outstanding women bound in absolute friendship during their adolescence in post-soviet Tbilisi during the 90ies, fighting for their right for a future and their right to love – and trying to save their friendship after the harrowing death of one of them.

‘Here we stand, the trio that got away, that made the leap into the present; we, the survivors, who try to go on living as proxies for all those to whom this was not granted, and who will remain young for all eternity in these photographs.’

As the end of the century approaches, the voices calling for independence are growing ever louder. In this period of great upheaval, which culminates in chaos for the young state of Georgia, Keto, Dina, Nene and Ira grow up alongside each other in an ‘Italian courtyard’ typical of Tbilisi’s Sololaki neighbourhood. Their lives play out between damp walls, and on enchanted wooden balconies; their families’ backgrounds and social status are as different as the four girls are from one another: Dina, hungry for freedom, fatherless, living with her unconventional mother; Ira, the clever outsider; Nene, the romantic, niece of the most powerful criminal in the city; and the sensitive, motherless Keto. The first love that can only blossom in secret, the violence that erupts with the country’s new-found independence, the bloody street battles and civil wars, food rationing and power cuts – despite everything, the four women’s friendship seems indestructible, until at last it is shattered by an unforgivable betrayal and another tragic death.
In 2019, they are reunited at a major retrospective of their late friend’s photographs in Brussels. These pictures recount their story, which is simultaneously the story of their country. And so, this very intimate retrospective forces them to lift the veil drawn over their past. Suddenly, after all these years, a light is shone into the shadow world of their memories; something new is glimpsed, and forgiveness seems possible.

»Lack of Light« is the story of a lost land and a lost generation; of a revolution that devours its children; of a friendship that defies death; of phantom pain, a battle with oneself and the world, a struggle with fate. It is also a homage to Georgia, the city of Tbilisi, and its people: a declaration of love across the ages.

Nino Haratischwili, born in Tbilisi in 1983, is a multiple-award-winning novelist and dramatist and one of the most important authors of contemporary German literature. Her worldwide bestseller, the epic family saga »The Eighth Life (for Brilka)«, was translated into numerous languages and nominated for the International Booker Prize. Her novel, »The Cat and the General« was shortlisted for the German Book Prize in 2018. Nino Haratischwili lives in Berlin.

»Stauffer’s texts do not shy away from the ›sharp pains‹ that a comprehensive look at the splendor and misery of human existence brings. In addition to their formal range, the unpredictability of these texts is fascinating. Time after time, it hits its mark: straight into the heart.« From the jury's statement of the Manuscript Advancement Award.

»I live in this text, floating from line to line, playing the dead woman. Only here in this sea can I swim, but now it freezes over on all sides.«
Only in appearance do the records oscillate between reality and dreams in their outer chronology, which begins in November 2020 in Vienna. In fact, the text immediately emancipates itself, plunging deeper into a elaborate clockwork whose hands stand still: We accompany the narrator on walks through the deserted Prater neighborhood, and stroll through the nocturnal, closed city, while her precise observations alternate small sharp sequences with lyrical passages. In what paradise can we observe ourselves living today, and what will come in the summer? Witty and cheeky, both sad and comforting, Verena Stauffer reveals an »I« as a center in a time when the longing for touch grows as people are banished to their rooms. She forms a protocol of the »madness that now reveals all the flaws in the entire construction of society,« and offers a testimony to the ways poetry and imagination can offer a lifeline. Verena Stauffer takes on a poetic and humorously biting form as she describes everyday life in times of pandemic.

Verena Stauffer was born in 1978 in Kirchdorf an der Krems in Austria. Her her debut novel Orchis (2018) was nominated for the Alpha Literary Prize, the Independents’ Hotlist, and the Blogger Debut Prize. Most recently her poetry collection Ousia was published by Kookbooks and nominated for the Austrian Book Prize. She is living in Vienna.

Following the success of her novel Mischpoke!, Marcia Zuckerman returns with the next entry in her turbulent German-Jewish family story full of the twists and turns of fate, told through vivid and lively narration—a great reading pleasure.

This turbulent family story full of twists and turns begins on the high seas between New York and London: Johannes »John« Segall, scion of a Jewish family who fled to England on the last Kindertransport in 1939, unexpectedly receives a photograph that sheds light on the last violent minutes of his father’s life. In order to fulfill his own personal mitzvah, John follows the trace of trails scattered over several countries: There is Benno Kohanim-Rubin, who fought in the British Army against the Nazis, his brother Walter who raised the red communist flag over the highest factory chimney in Berlin on  May 1, 1933, and Caesar and Selma Bukofzker, who set sail for Palestine, but, through the infamous odyssey of the ship Atlantic, land in Mauritius. Following the traces of his far-flung family and the wild ramifications of their lives, he comes across outrageous stories of great tragedy and overwhelming injustice; of luck in misfortune, unexpected rescue – and more than one shemozzle.

Marcia Zuckermann tells the story of a German-Jewish family, closely interwoven with historical events that reveal their fortitude in the face of a broad spectrum of persecution. With chutzpah and lively storytelling, she creates an animated panorama of characters from Mischpoke!, whose emigrant fates now take center stage in Shemozzle!.

»I had set upon a vague plan to finally create a proper family chronicle, one with family trees diagraming a confusing, crazy clan that now no longer exist. The only thing we have is our history and our stories, as a last snapshot before the final demise and disintegration of the family. Fortunately, I had no idea at the time what an adventure I was about to embark upon.« From Shemozzle!

Marcia Zuckermann was born in Berlin in 1947. Her Jewish father survived the Holocaust as a political prisoner in the Buchenwald concentration camp, while her Protestant mother was active in the resistance as a communist. In 1958, the family fled the GDR for West Berlin where Zuckermann trained in advertising in the publishing industry. Today she is a freelance journalist and author living in Berlin. Her successful novel Mischpoke! (2016) was published by FVA.

»Borders, transculturalism, finding identity in the interplay between two cultures: the accuracy and power and defiant audacity of the portrayal in this text completely won us over.« Jury of the Bremen Literature Office in the artist’s house Worpswede

»Don’t touch the interesting ones, marry someone who knows how to cook.« Like all women in the Atanassov family, Grandma Denka is as happy to share her life’s wisdom as her granddaughter, our narrator, is to throw it to the wind. She left Bulgaria shortly before the fall of the Berlin wall, and now lives with her husband and daughter in an apartment building in Bremen where hair curlers and soap suds rule. She feels alienated and misunderstood, even in her own marriage. When her father dies, she travels back to her hometown on the Black Sea. There, in her grandmother, mother, and mother-in-law, she encounters strong, dominant women who have always held the strings, and for the first time she investigates the blind spots that reach far back into the country’s communist past. She comes to an understanding of how deeply she is woven into this colorful family web and recognizes which connections provide support and which threads need to be undone.
Antonia Bontscheva describes a generation of self-confident women, the history of individual fates in communist Bulgaria through the transition period, and the realities of migration and self-assertion. With passionate, sensual language, warm and humor, the author’s human-centered gaze make this captivating novel shine.

»The sun poured its gold onto the water. A still-summery, lush, lavish gold upon a green and inviting water. Yet a thin, gauzy ache lay over it all. The beauty of Balchik is not a serene one. The beauty of Balchik is wise and somehow dramatic. It’s beauty breaks your heart.«

Antonia Boncheva was born in Varna, Bulgaria and lives today with her family in Bremen. She studied German language and literature in Berlin, worked as a German teacher and as a journalist, including on a literary radio column for »Funkhaus Europa.« The Beauty of Balchik is not Serene is her debut novel, for which she received the Bremen Author’s Scholarship from the Senator for Culture and a grant from the Bremen Literature Office in the artist’s house Worpswede.