There is hardly a theatrical profession that has recently been so fostered, celebrated, loaded with prizes and grants as young dramatists....
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Now is the winter of the woman author. Among the favourite novelists of the season are Terezia Mora, Antje Ravic Strubel, Juli Zeh, Brigitte Kronauer and Irina Liebmann. Thank goodness they're not so young that we have to speak of a new girl-wonder phenomenon. In nonfiction, however, the men have the upper hand. Weighty biographies have been written about Friedrich Schiller, Hermann Josef Abs, Arthur Koestler and Frederick the Great. We present the most interesting releases in Books This Season.
Don't get caught with your books closed!
German fiction 
Terezia Mora's debut novel "Alle Tage"
(excerpt
in German) is praised to the skies. Mora, born in Hungary in 1978, has
lived in Berlin since 1990. Already known for her collection of short
stories "Seltsame Materie" (Odd Material) and her translations - above
all of Peter Esterhazy's 2001 "Harmonia Caelestis", Mora tells
the story of a man named Abel Nema who arrives in a German city 'B'
from what we assume to be the former Yugoslavia. Abel is unable to
adjust. Mora tells the story of one person cut off from everyone around
him - someone who can speak ten languages fluently but is
unable to communicate. Language is just a way of filling the inner
void. Nema speaks perfectly, free of any accent, but also free of
personality. FR critic Michael Adrian calls the story a
"sparklingly intelligent, well constructed big city novel, full of
power and fruitless love." For Adrian it is "one of the most ambitious and original, the most complex and beautiful books to appear in German in recent times." 
Reactions to Antje Ravic Strubel's novel "Tupolew 134" are every bit as jubilant. Based on a real event, the book tells the story of an East German couple who hijacked
a plane to flee to the West in 1978. Hubert Spiegel celebrates the book in the FAZ
as a "fascinating" novel on the "daredevil escapades of our memory".
Spiegel is especially impressed by one of the major themes of the
novel, the "impossibility of love without freedom". The hijackers forced
the plane to land in West Berlin, and were later acquitted by a German
jury and an American judge. But the author quickly departs from
"the safe ground of historical facts", shifting to the unsafe ground of
fiction. Strubel was not concerned with how things were, but how they
might have been, which explains why she did not preserve the
original constellation of characters. For Spiegel the result is a German-German love story against the background of the Cold War, a "wicked and wonderful fairytale about how the East Germans lost their faith in fairytales." Only Die Zeit
is ambivalent, praising the book's subtleties but calling it "overly
complex". Reviewer Ulrich Greiner prefers the "wit and understanding" of Juli Zeh's "Spieltrieb". Following her celebrated debut "Adler und Engel",
Zeh's second novel has received widespread acclaim. Recounting the
story of two schoolchildren who blackmail their sports teacher, the
work is a "poetic reflection on philosophic questions of existence,
ethics and identity."
New works by Brigitte Kronauer and Irina Liebmann are also popular with the critics. Kronauer's novel, with the Nietzsche-inspired title "Verlangen nach Musik und Gebirge", tells of love intrigues in the Belgian seaside resort of Ostende. SZ
critic Lothar Müller is delighted by the malicious confusion of love",
developed by the author. Müller is especially taken by the novel's
narrator, Frau Fesch, who to his delight prefers a "mean look" and "sharp tongue" to the "guileless blinking" of the many narrators of the younger generation. Writing in Die Zeit, Iris Radisch calls Irina Liebmann's "Die freien Frauen" her best work to date. In it Liebmann follows a confused woman travelling through Berlin to Kattowitz
in Poland. Radisch is particularly pleased that Liebmann's book is "one
of the few German books" told from the perspective of an ageing woman.
Radisch praises the book's "strong allegorical images", calling it a
"contemporary ageing elegy with remarkable diagnostic power".
International fiction
For reviewer Felicitas von Lovenberg of the FAZ, it would be difficult to
recommend a more "enlightening, multi-faceted book about Israel,
families and what binds and separates people" than Amos Oz' "Eine Geschichte von Liebe und Finsternis" ("A Tale of Love and Darkness", review in the Guardian). For Karl-Markus Gauß of the SZ,
it is "Oz at his most personal". The autobiographical novel will
certainly be remembered as one of the best of the season and beyond. In
it, Oz tells of life in Israel in the early postwar years, the
beautiful yet traumatic experiences of East-European Jews who
barely escaped the Holocaust and of his mother's suicide. Tragedy and
wit, pleasure and learning come together in the book, which Gauß calls
a thrill and "a lesson in Central European and Hebraic history". In the
FR, Martina Meister calls the book an "autobiographical masterpiece".
Fiction /
Arabic Literature /
Memoirs and Biographies /
Politics /
Nonfiction
RSS
Since its publication in January, Helene Hegemann's novel "Axolotl Roadkill" has been at the centre of a debate whose vagaries of terminology have allowed the seriousness of the case to be downplayed. Philipp Theisohn wishes the literary establishment would drop all its talk of intertextuality in favour of a more democratic category: plagiarism.
UPDATE: The German Book Prize 2009 has been awarded to Katrin Schmidt for her novel "You're Not Going to Die". Read excerpts from all the shortlisted titles - including one from the Nobel Prize laureate Herta Müller's novel "Everything I Own I Carry With Me".
Günter Grass has just published his diary from 1990, recording the tumultous events after the fall of the Berlin Wall. "From Germany to Germany" is a list of ominous predictions for the future of German unity. The former GDR writer Monika Maron looks at how blinded Grass was by his own preconceptions.
This year Turkey was the guest country at the Frankfurt Book Fair. We introduce the books that attracted the most critical attention.
and all the best for 2009!
This year's prestigious Büchner Prize went to Austrian writer Josef Winkler. He talks to Paul Jandl about dung heaps, patriarchs, the fear of speechlessness and the elegance of John Paul II's coffin. Photo © Jerry Bauer / SV
The six finalists for the German Book Prize 2008, an annual award for the best German language novel, have now been announced. Signandsight.com presents English excerpts of the shortlisted titles for the first time.
The legendary German poets, Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan, met and fell in love in Vienna 1948. Their electric and torturous correspondence, which continued until 1961, has now been collected in book form for the first time. Ina Hartwig on what was probably the most complicated love story in post-war Germany.
The headlines were stolen by Charlotte Roche's moist little sex shocker and Jonathan Littell's sprawling SS fantasies but only two books united the critics: one is good and the other, utterly objectionable. There was a flurry of interest in some fabulous comics and a resurgence of the political and the historical novel. A dip into the books published in Germany this spring.