Among contemporary German authors, one stands out who for years has been able to operate in various forms of expression and does not fit into any category: Thomas Kapielski....
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Seas of stone
The publication of the report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has kicked off a heavy debate which - as EU's the recent climate protection plans show - is affecting political decision-making. The NZZ feuilleton asked writers from far and wide to report on climate change from a personal point of view. The series begins with Swiss author Leo Tuor, who has felt the effects of the Earth's warming right up to his belly button.
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Underwater
Continuing with the series, originally published in the NZZ, of first-hand accounts of climate change by international writers, Hans Maarten van den Brink talks of arks and dykes and watersport and the Dutch obsession with the sea.
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Black Christmas
In the NZZ's climate change series, Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie tells how Christmas changed in 2006, with choking heat and clammy bedsheets.
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Rain
Continuing the NZZ's climate change series, Sri Lankan author Romesh Gunesekera tells how everything is perfect for the model farmer with a mathematical mind. Until the rain messes up his calculations.
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From Bombay with smog
In a new sequel of the NZZ's climate change series, Kiran Nagarkar affords a lung-clogging view from Bombay, where this winter the smog was a block of dirty concrete that started a couple of metres from where you stood and stretched all the way to the sky.
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Meteorologists versus shamans
Continuing the NZZ's series of first-hand accounts of climate change by international writers, siberian-born Juri Rytcheu picks fun at polar meteorologists and admits he wouldn't mind it getting a bit warmer.
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Grapes from Greenland
Continuing the NZZ's series of first-hand accounts of climate change by international writers, Danish author Jorn Riel tells of his psychedelic visions for the future of the Arctic.
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Fools' gold and carbon credits
To round off the NZZ series of writers on climate change, Zakes Mda of South Africa takes on the trade in carbon credits. Instead of providing an incentive to control pollution, it gives the world's wealthy classes carte blanche to pollute with clear consciences.
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Former East-German novelist Christa Wolf has spent a lifetime writing against forgetting and the repression of guilt. But the will to remember, it seems, has not been enough to prevent her from doing exactly that. Her biographer Jörg Magenau reviews her new autobiographical novel "Stadt der Engel", which ends in Death Valley. Perhaps 'dead end' would have been more to the point. Photo:©Susanne Schleyer
The Austrian writer Josef Haslinger talks about his sexual encounters with paedophile priests as a boy in a Catholic boarding school. Instead of joining the chorus of moral outrage, he acknowledges the full spectrum of feelings that these episodes provoked, and argues that simple criminalisation is not the way forward.
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".
The new novel by Nobel laureate Herta Müller tells of a harrowing experience which will leave an indelible stamp on its survivor for the rest of his life. Her book stems from interviews with the poet Oskar Pastior and other Gulag survivors. An excerpt in English.
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