Thursday 18 March, 2010
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.
Photo: Josef Haslinger by Tom Langdon
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Wednesday 10 March, 2010
Artur Domoslawksi's biography "Ryszard Kapuscinski non-fiction" sparked controversy even before it was published. Not only does it show the legendary reporter warts and all, it also shows where the reportage ends and fiction begins. Polityka's Daniel Passent meets the author who, in spite of it all, still regards Kapuscinski as his friend and master.
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Friday 5 March, 2010
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.
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Friday 16 October, 2009
"Herta Müller has eyes like spotlights that drive out the darkness night after night." So begins Verena Auffermann's portrait of this year's literary Nobel laureate, in her book about 99 women writers, "Leidenschaften".
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Tuesday 13 October 2009
Romanian novelist Mircea Cartarescu celebrates Herta Müller's Nobel Prize, raising his glass to a writer with an inner sword and a literary style that is pure poetry.
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Thursday 9 September, 2009
Oleg Yuriev takes a black tomcat to the crossroads on Christmas Eve to gain new perspectives on the mysterious nature of money and why it always vanishes.
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Friday 15 May, 2009
We are about to close the chapter on the age of the printed book. It is a time for bullet biting and belt tightening, but not mourning. Jürgen Neffe takes a refreshingly postive look into our post-Gutenbergian future.
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Monday 2 March, 2009
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.
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Monday 22 December, 2008

This year Turkey was the guest country at the Frankfurt Book Fair. We introduce the books that attracted the most critical attention.
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Monday 22 December, 2008
and all the best for 2009!
Signandsight will be back again on January 9th.
(Photo squirmelia)
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Monday 17 November, 2008
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
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Thursday 9 October, 2008
Does participation at the Frankfurt Book Fair mean making propaganda for the AKP? In Turkey, this year's guest country at the Book Fair, writers have been feuding over this issue for months. Some of them have even called for a boycott. This time, however, it's more than just a Kemalist-Islamist divide. By Constanze Letsch
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Monday 29 September, 2008
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.
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Thursday 4 September, 2008

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.
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