On Literature in 2015 It sounds so easy: you pick the most important novels, short stories and poetry editions from a year; you assess and evaluate them, and finally you say what these novels, short stories and poetry collections share in common and what they reveal about current trends. Feuilleton editors often steel themselves for…
Literary trends across Europe
2015, Literary trends across Europe
On the diary as a literary genre/ Über das Tagebuch als literarische Gattung
by Peter Zimmermann •
Awake. Get up. Snow outside. The diary or journal as a literary genre enjoys huge popularity in the publishing world. So why is this? Because it satisfies the need for authenticity? Because a reader gets closer to a writer through his or her fictional texts? Because when filtered through a writer’s viewpoint everyday life suddenly…
2015, Literary trends across Europe
WOMEN ON THE EDGE OF A NERVOUS BREAKDOWN
by Katja Perat •
I never belonged to the big fans of crime stories. I never knew the collected works of Agatha Christie by heart. When Stieg Larsson became a big thing, I did not even try hard enough to go to the cinema. And then something happened. Girls took over the wheel. Girls who, in spite of the…
2015, Literary trends across Europe
Kafka’s ‘The Trial’ at The Young Vic: A sexed-up parable of modernity
by Judith Vonberg •
As the actors took their bows, I applauded loudly, marvelling at the performance of Rory Kinnear as Josef K., a banker who is woken on his thirty-fifth birthday with the news of his arrest on unspecified charges and thus plunged into a nightmare of senseless, humiliating and ultimately futile judicial proceedings. Yet navigating the subterranean…
2015, Literary trends across Europe
Beautiful Book Award/ Auszeichnung für schönste Bücher
by Beat Mazenauer •
Every year in various European countries beautiful books are nominated for an annual award. This is a celebration of finest quality books, creative design and traditional print craftsmanship. The typography may be as accurate as ever, the layout as original, paper as unique and production as intricate as can be, but the annual nominations offer…
2015, Literary trends across Europe
An important discussion in Hungary: Novels on Holocaust, Part 1
by Agnes Orzoy •
More than political speeches and formal acts, literature has an important role in sensitizing people to the suffering of others. Rather than doing that, however, the abundance of tear-jerker movies, streamlined teen lit, and often badly-written (and in some cases, forged) memoirs about the Holocaust have the opposite effect: creating what has been termed as…
2015, Literary trends across Europe
An important discussion in Hungary: Novels on Holocaust, Part 2
by Agnes Orzoy •
Published in English in 1989 by Macmillan, János Nyíri’s Battlefields and Playgrounds immediately became a success in the UK. However, this book is all but unknown in Hungary. Granted, it was published in Hungarian in 1990 (under the title Madárország), when the country was engrossed in the regime change, but even its new, 2014 edition…
2015, Literary trends across Europe
The consequence of history: European poetry as representation of the modern nation
by Steven J. Fowler •
Every nation’s literature contains within it multiplicities. Not only are definitions of these traditions based on approximations, that which has been recorded, assigned, that which has had the fortune of being discovered, but the very concepts around what actually makes a poem or a novel is ever changing. In fact the very intransigence, and ever…
2015, Literary trends across Europe
What is Austrian about Austrian literature?/ Was ist österreichisch an der österreichischen Literatur?
by Peter Zimmermann •
In Austria, an audience attuned to culture gets indignant if Austrian writers are treated as German writers. This happens now and again – I last noticed it in Eva Menasse’s case in an anthology about German-Israeli relations. I have to admit, people used to get much more hot and bothered. For instance, a few years…
2015, Literary trends across Europe
Fahrenheit 451
by Beat Mazenauer •
The ‘Perlentaucher’ website recently published a text by Wolfram Schütte “On the Future of Reading”. It was a flamboyant plea for a critical online journal that could be symbolically known as “Fahrenheit 451”. A lively debate followed, see https://www.perlentaucher.de/essay/perlentaucher-debatte-literaturkritik-im-netz.html Digital media threaten the traditional sinecures yet also offer opt-outs from awkward predicaments. Wolfram Schütte’s plea…