Cornelia Funke tells stories of fairies and mud monsters, of adventurous girls, a gang of children in Venice ? and her stories somewhere between fantasy and adventure are Germany?s most successful literary export at the moment....
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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
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.
The nonfiction books this spring look into life as a budding president, a kitchen slave, a prophet, a string quartet. They pick apart the world of the elites, of lust and taste and '68.
Travels through the dreams and nightmares of Europe, in a small land of great poets, torn between Balkan catastrophe and Brussels. A reportage on Croatia, this year's partner country at the Leipzig Book Fair. By Gregor Dotzauer 
An SS man reflects on mass murder - and there's a pigeon hole for every vile deed. Novelist Georg Klein on the Holocaust and the enlightened harmony of trivial realism in Jonathan Littell's novel "Les Bienveillantes" which has just been translated into German.
The 400-page German translation of Jonathan Littell's corpse-littered SS novel,"Les Bienveillantes," has put the German-language feuilletons into a critical frenzy, despite the general consensus that the book is bad. We have compiled a selection of the accusations hurled. 
Kurt von Hammerstein was head of the Reichswehr, a grand seigneur, and an implacable opponent of National Socialism. In his new book "Hammerstein oder Der Eigensinn" (Hammerstein or idiosycrasy), Hans Magnus Enzensberger engages in dialogues with the dead to deliver a literary and lunatic precipitate of German history.
This literary autumn belongs to two Russian writers: Vassily Grossmann and Varlam Shalamov, whose epic works have been published in German at long last. But older Germans and German Romantics, Polish queens, Romanian Mannerists, combative atheists, Neopolitan Camorristi, Catalonian knights and a glutton of glorious abandon have also come up trumps.
The literary event of the season is the inexplicably delayed publication of two Russian masterpieces: Vassily Grossmann's historic drama of the 20th century "Life and Fate" and Varlam Shalamov's collection of tales from Kolyma "Durch den Schnee". On the German side, we have seen older novelists flexing their muscles and reaching for the skies, biographers looking up to bygone giants, and the feuilletons rallying to defend religion against the air strikes of Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins. 
The novel is blooming in the Urals, where the children of the former technology elite are letting their imaginations run riot. By Sonja Margolina
Polish author Andrzej Stasiuk's book "Dojczland" is a sophisticated portrait of German-Polish relations with flights of sarcasm and a fine sense of grotesque. Doused heavily in bourbon, it's a controversial bestseller in Poland. By Thomas Urban
Romanian literature is still a tiny niche in the German book
market. Mircea Cartarescu's latest novel to be published here,
"Die Wissenden," shows readers what they are missing. A visit to
Bucharest to meet the man who is probably Romania's most famous author. By Jörg Plath
Come cruising in the park they say is dead. In his
biography of Stefan George, Thomas Karlauf reveals the charismatic German poet's authoritarian practices and the homoerotic core of his work. By Alexander Cammann
Rüdiger Safranski has pulled off the improbable: his book on Romanticism is a genuinely exciting account of German intellectual history. By Ulrich Greiner
Germany's book market is being flooded this autumn by biographies of dead male writers. Ina Hartwig examines the whys, wherefores and potential pitfalls of this latest literary craze.
The German Book Prize 2007, an annual award for the best German language novel, has been awarded to Julia Franck. Read an English excerpt of her book, "Lady Midday", and of the other five on the shortlist.