Schรถffling & Co.
Rights Guide Frankfurt 2007
Margit Schreiner born in Linz, Austria, in 1953, is currently living there again after many years in Tokyo, Paris, Rome and Berlin. She has won various scholarships and awards for her writing, most recently the Cultural Prize of the Province of Upper Austria. Awards (selection): Theodor Kรถrner Award Scholarship of the German Literature Foundation Austrian State Scholarship Cultural Prize of the Province
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photo: Alfred Pittertschatscher
of Upper Austria
»So precise and clear does Margit Schreiner realize all the many impositions and few lucky moments in life, particularly grotesqueness it entraps us in, that she creates pure poetry.«
Spiegel
Margit Schreiner, Trespass Following on from the huge success of HAUS, FRAUEN, SEX comes a new, rousing piece of gender prose from the pen of one of the greatest Austrian authors: merciless, dramatic, provocative, bitterly angry – and funny. »An excellent read to start off the new book season. (...) A cross section of real life, as chaotic as it is, but never without continuity and narrative structure. (...) HAUS, FRIEDENS, BRUCH is Schreiner’s most personal book to date and also her most insightful one – the portrait of a writer’s life, witty and melancholic, contemplating the conditions and possibilities of one’s own literary producing as unobstrusive as intelligent, crisscrossed by subtle irony (...) So concise and confident, so vividly and spot-on in depicting the many impertinences and few lucky moments in life.« SPIEGEL online 248pp 48,200 words
»Overwhelmingly funny. (...) There is no one to match Schreiner in teasing out the zeitgeist from our seemingly unimpressive everyday.« Die Presse »World-class. (...) Counsel and consolation from Margit Schreiner, always useful, even for menfolk.« Kurier
RIGHTS SOLD:
Croatia: Durieux
book club (Austria): Donauland serials: Die Presse, Perlentaucher, Volltext paperback: Goldmann
Margit Schreiner, The Book of Disillusionments »Dying came more easily to me than I’d imagined, compared to my life. It doesn’t take much to exhale one last time and not to breathe in again. It practically takes care of itself. Once your mind is made up.« Margit Schreiner’s relentless, impartial gaze penetrates far beyond the human existence. With a virtuoso narrative power and succinctness the BUCH DER ENTTÄUSCHUNGEN describes the unstoppable process of disillusionment that characterizes life.
176pp 34,000 words #1 on the ORF-Bestseller List
»An air of gentle cynicism hangs over Margit Schreiner’s sentences, like bitter chocolate. Her refinement lies in a pseudo-naivety which goes beyond the surface but shows the normality of the terrible, and vice versa. The narrator never loses the delicate balance between cheerfulness and grief, alienation and sympathy.« Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
RIGHTS SOLD:
paperback: Goldmann
Turkey: Metis
Schöffling & Co., Kaiserstraße 79, D-60329 Frankfurt am Main, Germany, e-mail: kathrin.scheel@schoeffling.de
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Burkhard Spinnen born in MĂśnchengladbach in 1956, lives as a writer in MĂźnster.
Awards: Aspekte Literature Award Kranichstein Literature Award Konrad Adenauer Foundation Literature Award Oldenburg Award for Young Adult Literature Herbert Quandt Media Award Lower Rhine Literature Award
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photo: Isolde Ohlbaum
German Audio Book Award
»Spinnen writes, as if he had taken classes with T.C. Boyle and then trumped his teacher.«
DIE ZEIT
Burkhard Spinnen, The All Rounder Los Angeles 1984. Roland Farwick comes unstuck on the long jump. This costs the world’s top decathlete the medal and his career. Twenty years later he’s shot and wounded; he promptly restarts the life that had been on hold for so long. He starts a family. And gains a partner. The investigating detective Ludger Grambach is one of millions who witnessed Farwick’s fate back then. And his own past as a failed genius is closely linked to that of the decathlete. Instead of a friendship, however, a duel begins which is fought out on the periphery of the official police investigation and in the very depths of an internet game. Until everything that was put off twenty years ago finally has to be settled. Burkhard Spinnen manages the feat of writing a novel that is both thrilling crime fiction and a didactic tale about an entire generation of men and their flight from responsibility. novel. 392pp 96,000 words
English sample translation available »Burkhard Spinnen is a gifted observer of life.« Stern
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paperback: btb
The Netherlands: Ailantus
Burkhard Spinnen, Long Saturday Ulrich Lofart, bachelor and administrative jurist, falls in love in the supermarket with Dorothee, a young, lively management consultant. It isn't long before his professional and private life become total chaos. A prudent love-story set in day-to-day surroundings and an amusing novel about the excessive demands life itself makes. »Burkhard Spinnen sets a new standard. He has written a great book about the smaller things in life.« Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
RIGHTS SOLD: paperback: btb
novel. 304pp 56,000 words
Schöffling & Co., Kaiserstraße 79, D-60329 Frankfurt am Main, Germany, e-mail: kathrin.scheel@schoeffling.de
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Juli Zeh born in 1974, lives in Leipzig. She studied European and International Law and at the German Literature Institute in Leipzig and has worked at the UN in New York and in Krakow. 2001 saw the publication of her first book ADLER UND ENGEL, which became an international bestseller, having been translated into 29 languages so far. Her second novel SPIELTRIEB continues her literary success. The English edition of ADLER UND ENGEL was nominated for the international IMPAC Award. Juli Zeh is commissioned playwright of the RuhrTriennale 2007, one of the most important international arts festivals. Awards (selection): German Book Award Bremen Literature Award Rauris Literature Award Ernst Toller Award
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photo: David Finck
Per Olov Enquist Award
»Her sharp intellect absorbs the most complex issues, including elementary particles, to then put them into words with such playful precision it makes you swoon.«
Brigitte
Juli Zeh, Schilf »A detective who has fatal headaches, loves a physics theory and doesn’t believe in fate, solves his final case. A child is abducted without realising it. A doctor does things he’s not supposed to do. A man dies, two physicists quarrel, a police superintendent is in love. In the end, everything seems different from the way the detective thought it was – yet also exactly the same. The ideas that people have are a musical score; their lives are a kind of weird music.« This is a (philosophical) crime novel that demands everything of the present and the reader. Juli Zeh crafts a murder scenario such as we could never have imagined – and in the process illuminates the physics of time. English sample translation available
novel. 384pp 84,000 words
»Juli Zeh has long proven herself as one of the most interesting and intelligent writers of her generation. In SCHILF she explores the possibilities of the crime novel, the result is a marvelous story, told with virtuoso.« »Different strands are interwoven with the greatest refinement. A murder and its solution, the brutal rivalry between two scientist friends, a medical scandal, and the ultimate questions of existence.« bücher »SCHILF is the virtuoso presentation of an amazing narration. Juli Zeh steers through with confidence and ease, even wit.« Welt am Sonntag RIGHTS SOLD: France: Actes Sud The Netherlands: Ambo|Anthos
Sweden: Weyler Bokförlag UK: Harvill Secker, Random House UK US: Nan Talese/Doubleday
paperback: btb audio book: Der Audio Verlag book club: Büchergilde Gutenberg
Juli Zeh, Gaming Instinct »Juli Zeh is one of the most exciting voices to emerge in German writing in recent years. After her dramatic debut ADLER UND ENGEL, her new novel SPIELTRIEB is a daring literary achievement, questioning the very heart of contemporary German society with a powerful story of sexual exploitation. She writes like nobody else about the post-nihilist emptiness of the new European fun generation, exploring the vacuum of values with shocking honesty. SPIELTRIEB gives us a compelling and provocative view of the future, with a rare kind of philosophical insight.« Hugo Hamilton English sample translation available »Mind-blowing, admirable, revealing a razor-sharp intellect. Juli Zeh is an exceptionally gifted writer. In her Musil-like language, plastic and rigorous, a self-reflective, ironical game develops: fast-paced, high frequency, with maximum stakes. SPIELTRIEB stands symbolic for a new generation that has not yet been categorized. They know everything. But they believe in nothing. A poetic reflection on philosophic questions of existence, ethics and identity.« DIE ZEIT
novel. 576pp 151,000 words ZEIT Bestseller List #1 SPIEGEL Bestseller List ORF Bestseller List
»Such intense, exciting writing of the highest literary calibre, this novel is impossible to put down. Reminding the reader of the dramatically precise language of Robert Musil, this stunning and alarmingly credible novel illustrates how innocuous students can turn into terrorists. Written with scenic humor and psychological sensitiveness, enriching our perception and our fantasy.« Der Spiegel RIGHTS SOLD: Brazil: Record Croatia: Durieux Czech Republic: Odeon Denmark: Samleren/ gb-forlagene France: Actes Sud Greece: Opus Magnum
Italy: Fazi The Netherlands (trade & midprice): Ambo|Anthos Norway: Gyldendal Poland: W.A.B. Spain (Castilian): Kailas Sweden: Norstedts Turkey: Metis
paperback: btb book club: Büchergilde Gutenberg audio book: Der Audio Verlag stage adaptation: world premiere at the Deutsche Schauspielhaus Hamburg film rights: optioned
Schöffling & Co., Kaiserstraße 79, D-60329 Frankfurt am Main, Germany, e-mail: kathrin.scheel@schoeffling.de
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Franziska Gerstenberg born in Dresden in 1979, studied at the Institute for German Literature in Leipzig and lives in Hannover. She was the co-editor of the literary magazine EDIT. Awards: Lower Saxony’s Award for Most Promising Writer ZDF aspekte Literature Award (special recommendation) Heinrich Heine Scholarship Hermann Hesse Award for
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photo: Birgitta Kowsky
Emerging Talent
»This author’s stories belong to the best of those of recent years. Everything about Franziska Gerstenberg’s stories is right, because she is a flawless storyteller.«
Südkurier
Franziska Gerstenberg, Gifts Like These »Blissfully brilliant. 14 stories (...) that once more prove this author’s exceptional talent.« Hannoversche Neue Presse »Franziska Gerstenberg has found a unique narrative voice. She tells stories about the trivialities of life, subtly introducing her themes until suddenly revaling the delicate threads – or the heavy ropes – that our lives hang by.« Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung »Franziska Gerstenberg writes masterful stories. From their overall tone down to the immaculate interpunctuation, everything is perfectly balanced, generating an immediate appeal.« Deutschlandradio »Gerstenberg’s stories work like earth plate motions, starting off seemingly motionless only to be suddenly shifted. They leave you wanting only one thing: more of them.« Vrij Nederland
stories. 248pp 65,000 words
»Franziska Gerstenberg convincingly boils down big issues into 14 wonderful stories. (...) Her texts revolve around the breaking down of old patterns and structures, revealing her astonishing knowledge of human nature. (...) We hope to read many more books by this author in the near future!« Frankfurter Rundschau
English sample translation available
RIGHTS SOLD:
audio book: LIDO paperback: btb
The Netherlands (first serial): Vrij Nederland US (first serial): Words Without Borders
Franziska Gerstenberg, How Many Birds Franziska Gerstenberg sketches quiet and vivid portraits of people in their early twenties: a generation that has crossed over the threshold of the Wende almost imperceptibly, and that has been pervaded – and sometimes severed – by the ideas of life and a society in which people are working together, succeeding one in which they were working against each other. English sample translation available »Gerstenberg writes with wonderful economy of action, using the poetry of her language and the sharpness of her observation to tell the tale. With this collection, Franziska Gerstenberg has made a spectacular entry onto the literary scene. At twenty-five years old, she is the leading light of the first generation of writers to be entirely at home in the new reunified Germany, and her stories provide snapshots from contemporary German life. Writing in the best tradition of German narrative prose, this is one young author who promises great things for the future.« new books in german
stories. 232pp 51,700 words
»An excellent debut with poetically exact snapshots from this new Germany, from these comfortless zones of life where the borders between East and West have already become blurred. Even on unfamiliar ground Franziska Gerstenberg succeeds with glowing images and glittering twists, witty symbols standing for the attitude towards life of a whole generation – and for a great talent.« Neue Zürcher Zeitung »The new star in the literary world.« die tageszeitung
RIGHTS SOLD:
paperback: btb book club: Büchergilde Gutenberg
The Netherlands: Ambo|Anthos US (first serial): Words Without Borders
Schöffling & Co., Kaiserstraße 79, D-60329 Frankfurt am Main, Germany, e-mail: kathrin.scheel@schoeffling.de
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Reinhard Kaiser born in 1950, lives as a translator, editor and author in Frankfurt am Main. Awards: German Youth Literature Award (for KÖNIGSKINDER) Geschwister Scholl Award (for »DIES KIND SOLL LEBEN«) Lower Rhine Literature Award Ernst Maria Ledig-Rowohlt Award
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photo: Anita Schiffer-Fuchs
for Translation
»Reinhard Kaiser takes the lightness of childhood seriously, and meets its serious sides with a light tone.«
Hessischer Rundfunk
Reinhard Kaiser, Childish With humour and a great gift of observation, Reinhard Kaiser creates bit by bit an amusing, consummate portrait of post-war Germany: Full of curiosity and with a childlike lack of preconceptions, he covers his beat – a secret garden, his father’s studio filled with abstract paintings, and the photo and radio shop run by his mother and uncle. But the traces of a taboo past are everywhere, a past rarely referred to but much more present than it appears. »There’s plenty more to be told about the spirit of the Fifties, and the most renowned authors fit to tell it. One of them is Reinhard Kaiser.« Süddeutsche Zeitung
prose. 160pp 32,300 words
»Kaiser returns to his roots recounting episodes from a postwar childhood – the childlike enthusiasm for discovery, the serendipities that illuminate historical context. (...) Kaiser’s great talent is to unearth stories from history.« Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung »Starting out on a cheerful note, Kaiser continues to reveal the traces of the past.« Frankfurter Rundschau
Reinhard Kaiser, Paper Kisses Rudolf Kaufmann, a young Jewish geologist, and the young Swede Ingeborg Magnusson met in 1935 in Bologna and spent thirteen precious days together before they had to part again. After that they had to make do with an exchange of letters, their correspondence telling the story of a »true love« that blossomed under the terrifying regime of Nazi Germany, a love at the wrong place, at the wrong time. »Kaiser’s gem of a story provides readers with a fresh, intimate angle from which to view the devastating effects of Hitler’s war on the world.« Publishers Weekly »Reinhard Kaiser might have written a novel based on these letters. But he’s accomplished something finer. Paper Kisses is a sort of archeology of the heart: beautiful, heartbreaking, memorable.« Mary Dora Russell, author of ›A Thread of Grace‹ memoir. 128pp 25,600 words with illustrations
English sample translation available RIGHTS SOLD: Greece: Boukoumanis Italy: Mondadori bookclub Korea: Motive Publishing Spain (Castilian World): Alba Editorial Taiwan: New Sprouts US (English World): Other Press
Previously published with rights now reverted: France: Autrement Italy: Longanesi, TEA paperback Japan: Hakushuisha Sweden: Alfabeta paperback: Fischer paperback (second edition): BVT film: optioned
Schöffling & Co., Kaiserstraße 79, D-60329 Frankfurt am Main, Germany, e-mail: kathrin.scheel@schoeffling.de
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Rebecca Maria Salentin born in 1979, lives with her two sons in Leipzig. She has received a scholarship from the Literary Colloquium Berlin (LCB). HINTERGRUNDWISSEN EINES
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photo: Illes Strzedulla
KLAVIERSTIMMERS is her first book.
»Her striking imagery, sophisticated figures and singulary eccentric characters will put readers under a spell.« Kulturmagazin Kunststoff
Rebecca Maria Salentin, The Education of a Piano Tuner Krakow at the end of the 19th century: a landowner abandons his pregnant wife and doesn’t utter a word for the rest of his life; a piano tuner labors to coax beautiful sounds from beat-up old grand pianos and having succeeded, disappears without a word; plus a mother who is as cool and calm as she is unpredictable, a tropicsobsessed grandfather and two sisters who could not be more different from one other. Twenty years go by, and then one hot summer things escalate. In her debut novel, Rebecca Maria Salentin relates a monstrous family history in an astoundingly unique voice and through stunning imagery, creating a panorama of interwoven relationships that prove both humorous and extraordinarily moving. novel. 240pp 50,700 words
English sample translation available »A truly enthralling and thoroughly composed family portrait.« Main-Echo »Salentin employs a fresh yet luscious style to tell the tale of a Krakow landowner surprisingly leaving his family and pregnant wife to retreat into silence. (...) Salentin finds the right words, scenes, and images to convey the slow decline of the outer appearances as well as of the inner life of her authentic characters.« Münchner Merkur »A sophisticated and charming novel, reminiscent of Ibsen’s domestic dramas, narrated in a warm, humorous tone.« WDR
Schöffling & Co., Kaiserstraße 79, D-60329 Frankfurt am Main, Germany, e-mail: kathrin.scheel@schoeffling.de
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Klaus Schafmeister born in 1952 in Lemgo, lives with his family in Georgsmarienhütte. He is a civil servant and an editor for several regional newspapers. HÖLLENFAHRT is his
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photo: Günther Riesenbeck
first book.
»His language stands out clearly from the crowd of hastywritten novels in the book market.«
Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung
Klaus Schafmeister, Descent Into Hell Engelke Christensen is the only child of Paale, an island innkeeper and whisky smuggler. After her father suffers a stroke Engelke reluctantly returns to the small island in the shallow coastal waters. But all of her attempts to run not only the inn but also her father’s dubious business dealings draw her further into the maelstrom of her deadly family history, which finds its violent end in the Hamburg flood of 1962. HÖLLENFAHRT is the tale of the final days of a family for whom the words morality and humanity have lost their meaning. But at the same time, it is the story of a young woman and her desperate attempts to leave her history behind her. Italian sample translation available
novel. 360pp 66,000 words
»A masterful debut with a wild finale, fantastically written!« NDR Bücherjournal (TV) »An apokalyptical family portrait, written in a powerful, surprisingly baroque language.« mare »Diving into the abyss of human life, an archaic struggle for existence, unfolding an aura of magical poetry. (...) The reader is swept away by the rough atmosphere surrounding the old smuggler island, by its climate and bizarre ensemble of inhabitants, their stories and legends. (...) Such dense, fast-paced novel; such strong, phantasmagorical language.« Neue Zürcher Zeitung
Schöffling & Co., Kaiserstraße 79, D-60329 Frankfurt am Main, Germany, e-mail: kathrin.scheel@schoeffling.de
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Silke Scheuermann born in 1973, lives in Frankfurt am Main. Her poems and short stories have won her various grants and awards. She was on the Jury for the prestigious Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award and has edited the ›Jahrbuch der Lyrik 2007‹ (Yearbook of Poetry 2007). She will be visiting lecturer at the German Institute for Literature in Leipzig in autumn 2007. Awards: Hermann Hesse Award for Emerging Talent ZDF aspekte Award (special recommendation) Leonce and Lena Award Scholarship by Deutscher Literaturfonds, Casa Baldi Scholarship Deutsches Haus in New York
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photo: Paul Müller
Grimmelshausen Award
»Silke Scheuermann is a big talent, she is one of German literature’s great hopes.
Uwe Wittstock, Literarische Welt
Silke Scheuermann, The Hour Between Dog and Wolf Two sisters meet again after a long estrangement. Ines, an impulsive artist, needs help, but is met with cold rejection because her sister has no desire to resume her old role as Ines’s rescuer. She wants nothing more to do with her sister’s world and yet increasingly is fascinated by it. At the outset of an affair with Ines’s boyfriend, she loses herself in a dubious, delirious state of happiness – which leads her back to Ines in an unexpected way. »Silke Scheuermann has written her way to the top league of young authors. (. . .) A story that goes well beyond the sensibilities of young women, a story that builds touchingly on that great old theme: love.« DIE ZEIT novel. 174pp 38,800 words
»A most beautiful, sensual and intelligent novel. (. . .) Silke Scheuermann has found a wonderful voice, cool and poetic, subtly melancholic, her language possesses an amazing power of visualization.« Literarische Welt »Scheuermann employs her poetic facility to good effect as she renders the confusion and frustration her generation faces as it attempts to define itself. (. . .) Non-Germans too are beginning to see the universality in her writing.« Publishing Trends English sample translation available RIGHTS SOLD: Bulgaria: Atlantis Czech Republic: Volvox Globator Italy: Voland Mexico (Castilian/Latin America): sextopiso
The Netherlands: Cossée Russia: Centrepolygraph Spain (Castilian/Spain): Siruela Sweden: Weyler Bokförlag first serial: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung paperback: Goldmann
Silke Scheuermann, Rich Girls »A brilliant piece of literature. Not since Judith Hermann’s stories did I read anything so beautiful.« Die Welt – Book of the Week »These seven stories are literary jewels. Scheuermann proves herself a master of the erotic narrative à la Maupassant.« De Volkskrant English sample translation available RIGHTS SOLD: China (Chinese simple): New Star Czech Republic: Volvox Globator Estonia: Pegasus Italy: Voland
The Netherlands: Cossée Russia: Centrepolygraph Syria (Arabic, World): Cadmus paperback: Goldmann
stories. 164pp 35,400 words
Schöffling & Co., Kaiserstraße 79, D-60329 Frankfurt am Main, Germany, e-mail: kathrin.scheel@schoeffling.de
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Ror Wolf born in 1932, is, besides Thomas Bernhard and Arno Schmidt, one of the most idiosyncratic and prominent authors of German Literature after 1945. His writing style resembles that of a collage, joining often disparate pieces together, a technique he also uses for his famous surrealistic picture collages. Since the early Sixties he creates surrealistic collages. His radio drama LEBEN UND TOD DES KORNETTISTEN BIX BEIDERBECKE AUS NORDAMERIKA is one of the most successful of German radio plays. Awards (selection): Bremen Literature Award Heimito-von-Doderer Award Rhineland-Palatinate Regional Award Main Award of the Bavarian
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photo: J端rgen Bauer
Academy of Arts
Ror Wolf's lyrical work belongs to »the most delightful examples being published of what is simultaneously the most contemporary and humorous of poetry.«
Robert Gernhardt
Ror Wolf, Pfeifer’s Travels The long-anticipated first edition of poems, most of which have never before seen print, from the years 1958 to 2006. »Literature is first and foremost made from language, rather than from thoughts or stories. No other German poet has shown this as passionately and vividly as Ror Wolf has. Rightly so, he is praised and adored by critics, scholars and writers alike.« Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung »Ror Wolf is a pioneer of pop literature. Like Jandl or H.C. Artmann, he shakes and mixes language; like Handke and Jelinek, he experiments with bits and pieces, with our everyday trivia.« Tages-Anzeiger
poems, ballads & songs. 264pp 26,400 words SWR Bestseller list
»Once again, these 150 previously unreleased pieces of prose bring to life Wolf’s absurd heroes from the last 40 years, in lines so resilent, rhymes so flexible as have – after Busch and Morgenstern – only ever been invented by Robert Gernhardt.« Der Tagesspiegel »The texts of Ror Wolf stand without comparison. He is capable of revealing the comical, the absurd element, the abysmal behind our everyday. His work stands as living proof that ‚serious’ literature may also be hilarious and entertaining.« Horst Köhler, Federal President of Germany
Ror Wolf, Two or Three Years Later: Forty-nine Digressions »Seldom in German literature has the seemingly solid ground of traditional narrative been so earthshakingly shattered.« DIE ZEIT »One of the most important contemporary German writers.« Brigitte Kronauer »Ror Wolf does not settle for the conventional concepts of realism, time, space, or causality. Instead, he picks his bits and pieces from crime stories, love stories, adventure stories, assembling them anew though his melodious prose. The result is thoroughly magical.« buchjournal
»A bright view on everyday madness.« Deutschlandradio prose. 200pp 36,200 words
English sample translation available
RIGHTS SOLD: audio book: parlando
Schöffling & Co., Kaiserstraße 79, D-60329 Frankfurt am Main, Germany, e-mail: kathrin.scheel@schoeffling.de
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Jens Rehn Jens Rehn (1918-1983) was a German navy officer who commanded a submarine during World War II. He was captured by Allied forces in 1943 and held in a British POW camp until 1947. After his return to Germany he worked for RIAS (Radio in the
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photo: Schiller Nationalmuseum/Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach
American Sector) Berlin.
»It is difficult to imagine a modern war story as philosophically or existentially enthralling as Rehn’s.« The New York Sun
Jens Rehn, Nothing in Sight It is 1943. A German submarine commander and an American pilot are stranded on a rubber dinghy, floating alone in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Both sit, hoping to be rescued, but there is no hope in sight. The stage is thus set for this hypnotic existentialist parable, a rediscovered classic in the literature of World War II. In a terse, almost clinically exact style NICHTS IN SICHT distills the brutal essence of what it is to die alone. Much more than a story of war, this short novel presents the memories, dreams, and hallucinations of two soldiers as they drift toward death. With nothing in sight on the horizon, Jens Rehn directs our view inward, into the minds of both men as they question the meaning of life, the existence of God, and the possibility of enduring human relationships. When NICHTS IN SICHT was first published in 1954, it was Gottfried Benn who called the book »rebellious, cynical, brilliant«. Siegfried Lenz described it as »hypnotic, unrelenting«.
novel. 164pp
»NICHTS IN SICHT, with its dramatic situation reduced to the barest minimum, the two men in the boat and nothing else, and with the action limited to noting but their impending and inevitable deaths, succeeds in bringing readers to the point Rehn is interested in showing to us, the moment of complete existential despair, both in the context of the German Zeitgeist of the 1950s and beyond, timelessly and universally. Rehn’s is a war story for all time.« © University of Chicago Press, Kenneth J. Northcott English sample translation available »There is a Beckettian sensibility to Rehn’s terse prose, a grim recognition of life’s absurdity.« The Sunday Times »Still a masterpiece. Even fifty years after its first publication.« Focus RIGHTS SOLD: France: Albin Michel Israel: Babel Italy: Frassinelli Russia: AST-Press US (English World): The University of Chicago Press
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»As an authentic chronicle and as a deeply moving testimony it ranks close to the diaries of Anne Frank and Victor Klemperer.« Geschwister-Scholl-Prize, The Jury's judgment
Helene Holzman, Let this Child Live The Writings of Helene Holzman 1941 – 1944 Edited by Reinhard Kaiser and Margarete Holzman This is the personal testimony of a woman who survived three years of Nazi occupation in Lithuania and escaped deportation to Russia’s Caucasus Region, which became the fate of many German Jews who fell into the hands of the Russians. With convincing, almost matter-of-factly prose, »DIES KIND SOLL LEBEN« offers a unique perspective on the Holocaust by an unlikely chronicler: a courageous woman of German origin with a Lithuanian citizenship, living outside the Jewish ghetto but with strong ties to the ghetto’s inhabitants; half-Jewish but regarded as German.
memoir/biography. 416pp with 60 illustrations and maps
Six days into the German occupation, Max and Marie, the couple’s older daughter, were arrested. Max remained missing while Marie returned to her family three days later, only to be arrested again for anti-war agitation among hospitalized German soldiers. This time she would not be released - Marie was executed by the Nazis in October 1941. Helene was paralyzed by the loss of her loved ones. Her own life, too, was endangered because of the public knowledge of her marriage to a Jew and Marie’s pacifist activities. But she refused to be victimized, being determined to save her youngest child’s life and help fellow Jews outwit the Nazis and Lithuanian antiSemites. Helene and her surviving daughter Margarete disobeyed orders to move into the ghetto. Instead, Helene encouraged the ghetto inhabitants to flee... English sample translation available »Without doubt this is a historic source of the highest quality.« DIE ZEIT »This book won't go out of your mind, it is a stroke of luck.« Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
RIGHTS SOLD: China/simplified: Worker Publishing House France: Actes Sud, Grand Livre du Mois Italy: Marsilio Lithuania: baltos lankos Poland: Bertelsmann (rights reverted) Russia: New Literary Review Spain (Castilian): Galaxia Gutenberg, Círculo de Lectores (bookclub) Ediciones el Andén (paperback) Sweden: Lind och Co. paperback: List
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Schöffling & Co., Kaiserstraße 79, D-60329 Frankfurt am Main, Germany, e-mail: kathrin.scheel@schoeffling.de
»A must-have for cat-lovers.«
Detlef Bluhm, The Big Cat Encyclopaedia The must-have standard work on cats and their habits, origins and behaviour; on their images in art – above all literature – and history. DAS GROSSE KATZENLEXIKON ist comprehensive, indispensable, enchantingly illustrated – a rich treasure chest for anyone who loves cats and wants to know everything and more besides about them.
360pp 115,200 words with numerous illustrations
The Literary Cat Calender 2008 Edited by Julia Bachstein weekly wall calendar, 53pp with black-and-white photographs
RIGHTS SOLD: The Netherlands: Cossée Latvia: Apgads Mansards book club: Bertelsmann Club
Schöffling & Co., Kaiserstraße 79, D-60329 Frankfurt am Main, Germany, e-mail: kathrin.scheel@schoeffling.de
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Contact For more titles, further information and to acquire rights please contact: Kathrin Scheel Schรถffling & Co. Kaiserstraร e 79 D-60329 Frankfurt am Main e-mail: kathrin.scheel@schoeffling.de phone: +49 69 92 07 87 16 fax: +49 69 92 07 87 20 or visit our foreign rights site at http://www.schoeffling.de/content/ foreignrights/news-start.html