BOOKS FROM LUXEMBOURG 2020
HYDRE ÉDITIONS
FRANCIS KIRPS The Mutations: 7 stories and a poem, each with a classic text as a template and starting point, from Little Red Riding Hood to Virginia Woolf. The housefly Leon Sumsa wakes up one morning and finds itself transformed into a “monstrous vertebrate”, i.e., a human being. The lion from Kurt Tucholsky’s satire Der Löw ist los! (The Lion Is Loose!) mutates into a polar bear exploring hip Berlin. The model of the Venus statue from Prosper Mérimée’s tale La Vénus d’Ille (The Venus of Ille) works as a young slave in a “venture” that shows amazing parallels to today’s working world. Die Anekdote aus dem letzten preußischen Kriege (The Anecdote from the Last Prussian War) (Kleist) is moved to the future, where the last four people are at war with each other. Ingeborg Bachmann’s Anrufung des großen Bären (Invocation of the Great Bear) is crossed with Lovecraft’s Cthulhu myth and the result is a poem that strangely sounds like Gottfried Benn.
Francis Kirps
SHORT STORIES
2020 BOOKS FROM LUXEMBOURG
The Mutations
HYDRE ÉDITIONS
Genre Short Stories (Humour)
Original title Die Mutationen
Publication date 2019
Price 20.00 €
ISBN 978-2-9199541-3-1
Format 11 x 18 cm
Language German
Rights available World
Number of pages 220
Foreign sales Albania (Dituria Publishing House) Hungary (Colibri) Macedonia (Antolog Publishing House) Serbia (Treći Trg) Foreign rights contact Stefanie Drews Agency stefanie.drews@orange.fr
Bear on the Loose! after Der Löwe ist los! by Kurt Tucholsky It was Open House at the Berlin Zoo and that day of all days – maybe it was the fault of the celebratory joint which Zookeeper Pfleiderer had shared with Herr Özgüntürk from the Predator House and Frau Süskind from administration – the zookeeper forgot to lock the door of the polar bear’s cage after him. Which, in turn, Roald Björnsson, the longest-serving polar bear, took as an invitation to mingle with the people outside. Maybe it was even expected of him. And all those colourful balloons! Björnsson stepped outside. No sign of Pfleiderer. Instead, the visitors immediately broke into a mighty uproar. The crowd shouted and ran around everywhere. Children squealed, women screamed, men wept – it was as if the Beatles had just got off the plane.
This sample translation was commissioned by the EUPL, an initiative funded by the Creative Europe programme of the European Union. CHAPPLE Gerald, translator.
© CNL
Francis Kirps lives and works in Lintgen (Luxembourg). He has a degree in Psychology from the University of Strasbourg. He first started publishing in student magazines in the early 1990s and in the cultural journal Les Cahiers luxembourgeois in 1998. Since then, he has published two short story collections (Planet Luxembourg, 2012; Die Mutationen: 7 Geschichten und ein Gedicht [ The Mutations: 7 Stories and a Poem ], 2019) and one novel (Die Klasse von 77 [ The Class of 77 ], 2016), and has made numerous contributions to anthologies and contemporary short story collections.
ELISE SCHMIT For the protagonists in the collection of short stories Falling from Various Heights, everything revolves around the question of how life will continue following decisive upheavals. Watching from the kitchen window how tourists plunge to their deaths, driving aimlessly through all of Germany out of love sorrow until the money runs out, repairing a radio, because devices are easier to mend than a broken existence: the characters in Elise Schmit’s narrative Falling from Various Heights have had to come to terms with life after the great personal catastrophe. Whether they fall from rocks or in love – in the end every thing revolves around the question of how life will continue after the decisive upheavals.
Elise Schmit
SHORT FICTION
2020 BOOKS FROM LUXEMBOURG
Falling from Various Heights
HYDRE ÉDITIONS
Genre Short Stories Publication date 2018
Original title Stürze aus unterschiedlichen Fallhöhen Price 15.00 €
ISBN 978-2-9199541-0-0
Format 11 x 18 cm
Language German
Number of pages 114
Rights available World Foreign rights contact Stefanie Drews Agency stefanie.drews@orange.fr
© Boris Loder
Elise Schmit (*1982) was born and raised in Luxembourg. She holds a degree in German Studies with Philosophy from the University of Tübingen. After two extended stays in Tübingen and a shorter stint in Paris, she returned to Luxembourg in 2012 where she has been living and working since. Her writings have been honoured with several awards in Luxembourg. Falling from Various Heights is her first collection of short stories to be published.
If “we” had met two years ago, he said, “we” would not have had such a pleasant conversation. I certainly wouldn’t have talked to him. What was the idea of accusing me of prejudices that I had long since discarded, I thought. No work, no friends, no Marcia. Waves, salt water, ever deeper to where no more light penetrates, seabed, a few layers of sand and dirt, then, eventually, me. That is how far I had sunk. It took me months to understand that I could not hide in a house that would soon no longer be mine.
NOVEL
Sabotage In these four tales about broken hearts and bodies, sixteen narrators question the inept madness of the working world. A company decides to organise a fiendish, Darwinian version of a Team Building Game. At the job centre, the identities of the unemployed, fraudsters, artists and employees dissolve into a nebula where reality and fiction are intertwined. A book prize is creating chaos and hopes in the Luxembourgish literary scene, which is being closely examined by a TV reality show. A house of literature on the Wannsee is taken over by an unscrupulous banker for his birthday party, in the course of which two views of the world collide. In these four stories around broken hearts and bodies, 16 narrators question the inept madness of the world of work, while questioning language itself, sabotage their lives or the lives of others and go through episodes in which everyone discovers an impostor.
Jeff Schinker
BOOKS FROM LUXEMBOURG
2020
JEFF SCHINKER
HYDRE ÉDITIONS
Genre Fiction
Original title Sabotage
Publication date 2018
Price 22.00 €
ISBN 978-2-9199541-2-4
Format 11 x 18 cm
Language French, German, English, Luxembourgish
Number of pages 272
Rights available World Foreign sales Hungary (Colibri) Foreign rights contact Stefanie Drews Agency stefanie.drews@orange.fr
© Julie Conrad
Jeff Schinker, born in 1985, is a writer and the head of the cultural pages of the daily newspaper Tageblatt. He also organizes a series of readings with formal constraints. Sabotage – a project in four languages – is his second book publication, after the novella Retrouvailles (2015), also published by Hydre Éditions.
A bunch of office workers glides into the room – the working class mutated into citizens, a few rungs higher on the salary ladder, but just as bitter, humiliated, desireless, oppressed, easy to manipulate. I don’t bother to internalize their features even minimally. Yes, that’s bad taste. Excuse me. But I like that, the bad taste. Life, in general, is pretty distasteful, isn’t it? And he’d inevitably be blocked by this same dissatisfaction with all kinds of words, by his disgust in their tendency to the universal, one word for thousands of varieties and nuances of emotions, one expression to feed humanity. Words were dancing gigolos who’d adapt to every possible situation. He was done with them. By the entrance, the musicians where still arguing, frantically at times. Around them, not much could be recognized, the lighting was so minimal, as if one were in a fiction in which the author couldn’t be bothered with lengthy descriptions.
Hydre Éditions is a small bilingual publishing house from Luxembourg, named after the Hydra of Lerna, the many-headed water snake from Greek mythology. Since its foundation in 2012, the publishing house has published fiction in German and French. More recently, the publishing programme has focused on novellas and short stories, with publications by both confirmed writers and an emerging generation of Luxembourg authors.
Hydre Éditions 12, rue Biergerkräiz L-8120 Bridel Luxembourg +352 621 74 77 36 info@hydreditions.eu www.hydreditions.eu
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