You don't know where, you don't know when – but at some point love will strike, that's for sure. In this novel, two people, already well accustomed to single life, are struck completely out of the blue. He has the most fascinating eyes in the world, and her beauty sweeps him off his feet.

"Treffen Sich zwei" (lit.: two people meeting) is a romantic novel for adults, a heimat novel set in Berlin's Kreuzberg district. It's about desires and anxiety, about the professional life of a systems coach and the fits of a gifted hysteric, about self-help sex books, music, lyrics, classic passages about love, and with a good deal of alcohol and urine therapy thrown in for good measure.

Iris Hanika is a sensitive and unerring observer of the emotional condition of us contemporaries. The wittiness, accuracy and elegance in her writing demonstrate why this eternal theme in literature continues to touch every one of us to this day.

Since the end of the war in former Yugoslavia more than 30.000 persons were reported missing to the International Committee of the Red Cross. Until today only some 15000 persons were identified.

This is the background to the story Anna Kim tells in her second novel: the search of a Kosovar for his missing wife and the first-person narrator's gradual penetration into the complex correlations behind this traumatising event. Not only does she experience the everyday life in the Serbo-Albanian conflict zones of the Kosovo, the gut-wrenching work of the archaeologists and forensic anthropologists or the Red Cross questionnaires to collect “antemortem data”. Above all, the dimensions of memory and the loss of it, of interrupted biographies and of a “frozen time” open up in front of her.

In the extraordinary book, Anna Kim takes up where she left off in her debut novel “Die Bilderspur”, exploring the concepts of “foreign”, “foreignness”, “interrupted biographies” with a depressing relevance to the present. However it is not just contemporary history that she is interested in, but also the linguistic portrayal of such incomprehensible horror, the search for the right words and sentences to describe the “completely different”.

Anna Kim was born in South Korea in 1977. She studied Philosophy and Theatre Studies in Vienna and published her pieces in literature magazines. Her first novel, “Die Bilderspur”, appeared at Droschl in 2004.

In fact, everything is different. In fact, there is fiction on one side and reality on the other. In fact, this is just a pretence because in reality –
These well-known figures of speech (and thought) are where Almut Tina Schmidt's fast-paced first novel takes off at. The narrator travels to Antwerp (under a pretence) but she ends up first in Cologne, then in Bonn und continuously stumbles upon former school mates. Which may very well make us suspicious already. When in the end, the story grows to be a child-abduction thriller and we learn that her long-lost friend acts on behalf of her aunt Agnes, the plot turns into a complete grotesque.

In fact, “In Reality” is a story about the opaque relation between art and life, between original sound and art radio. It is for a reason that Almut Tina Schmidt once and again alludes to Orson Welles who, in his legendary radio adaptation of “The War of the Worlds”, so brilliantly blurred the boundaries of fiction and documentary.

But in reality, the novel deals with paranoia and false façades, with the idle talk the entertainment industries offer us as true form of authenticity, with the different, yet so identical jargons neurotically claiming the special and unmistakeable character of the individual. Fictitious, true – everything is equally grotesque. However, there is a distinct oppressive note to the funniness of this novel. For it is not really funny to have the rug pulled out from under your feet …

Almut Tina Schmidt, born in Göttingen, Germany, in 1971, studied literature, philosophy and political science, and today lives in Freiburg, Germany. She works as a free-lance writer producing novels, children's books, plays and radio plays. Her first novel “Auswachsen” was published at Droschl in 2002. In 1999, she was awarded the Berlin “Open Mike” prize and received the German literature award “Das neue Buch” in 2003.

Hardly an author of ours is as competent as Barbara Frischmuth when it comes to investigating the complex relations between Orient and Occident, between Middle East and West. The "Book of 1001 Nights" constituted her initiation into the book world, as she says, and ever since, the fascination with the cultural riches of the Islam has pervaded her own work in many ways.

Throughout the last years the Orient, Turkey and the Islam have been present not so much in culture as in politics. The fear of foreignness has been showing in previously inconceivable forms; dissociation and identity politics (but also ignorance) determine the political discourse on migration and the European Union.

This volume presents a selection of essays, speeches and other pieces on “oriental issues”. It is about the Muslim headscarf, the European element of Europe, about the EU and Turkey, and Muslim women, but most of all it is about the cultural riches the literature of the Orient would shower us with (if we just appreciated it) and about Islamic and Christian mystics or ingenious translators like Friedrich Rückert. Frischmuth's essays exemplify the fecundity of independent thinking – with wit, scepticism and cleverness she puts straight prejudices and set opinions of those German (or Austrian) contemporaries who like to think of themselves as definitely unbiased and open-minded.

Barbara Frischmuth, one of the most vital voices of Austrian literature, was born in 1941 in Altaussee, Styria. She studied Turkish and Hungarian, has published her work since 1962 and counts among the founders of the literary forum “Forum Stadtpark” in Graz. Until today more than 40 of her works as well as Hungarian translations, radio plays and essays have been published. Her latest novel “Vergiss Ägypten” was published at Aufbau-Verlag in 2008. Her collected poems „Schamanenbaum“ (2001), „Dossier 4: Barbara Frischmuth” (edited by Kurt Bartsch, 1992) and Dossier Extra: Barbara Frischmuth (edited by Silvana Cimenti and Ingrid Spörk, 2007) have been published at Droschl.

With Dead End for a title, Strobel's first work is coming on strong, suggesting a narrator who likes to approach things in a decidedly detached, matter-of-fact way. Strobel's style is not an embellishing one; abandoning literary elegance and false pretence he chases his protagonists towards their emotional dead ends: crisis situations, tensions in the family, among friends and neighbours.

“It's impossible not to be enthralled by the pithy, suggestive style of Strobel.” (Werner Schuster) “Virtuoso close-ups of the everyday scenes, the helpless gestures and awkward inadequacies of shared life – eerie but, at the same time, eerily captivating.” Susanne Jäger, ORF (Austrian Broadcasting Corporation)

Bernhard Strobel was born in Vienna in 1982, and continues to live there and in Northern Burgenland. He reads Scandinavian Studies.

Werner Schwab who in his lifetime was almost exclusively seen as a dramatist defined himself as a prose writer mainly. In interviews, he, time and again, pointed out that “thousands of pages of prose” were stored in drawers. In Volume One of his Complete Works one of these texts has been published for the first time now - i. e. Schwab's novel "Joe Mc Vie alias Josef Thierschädl" written by him during a stay in Denmark and immediately before he started working on his success "The Presidents/Holy Mothers". "Joe Mc Vie", in many respects, occupies a central position within the works of Werner Schwab. In it he laid the foundation for the Schwabian - his soon well renowned idiom, composed of witty jokes, parodies and many alienated parlances - and in it one source of Schwab's social criticism can be found, too: "Joe Mc Vie" takes place at a time when Kurt Waldheim ran for President of Austria and at the time of the 50th anniversary of Austria's “Anschluss” (union) with the German Reich, thus reflecting the political and social discourses of the time.

Meeting the Bieresch is set “in a mysteriously eerie no-man's-land” (according to the German author Wolfgang Hildesheimer) in the region of Seewinkel at the Eastern shore of the Austrian Lake Neusiedl. Narrator Hans, an ethnologist, stumbles upon an outlandish but strangely familiar ethnic minority, the Bieresch. Following an archaic rite they make him act as his recently deceased uncle. The world he gradually unravels turns out to be a maze-like night-mare of mutual interpretations and readings, of rituals and observations of others, of Kafka and Kabbalah, of stories, anecdotes and conjectures firmly and inescapably taking hold of him.

“A literary, allusive, suggestive enigmatic work of a rather worldly sensuousness standing out from the mass of literary works virtuously sticking to reality.” Alexander Kluy, Der Standard
“Meeting the Bieresch comprises a lot: a postmodernist novel, an ethnological bildungsroman, a modern version of mythopoeia as well as a multi-faceted criticism of civilisation. Above all, however, it constitutes an enticing book that merits being read and discovered anew.” Uwe Schütte, Volltext (Austrian literary magazine)
“I would like to suggest contemplating those novels by Peter Handke or Christoph Ransmayr, by Elfriede Jelinek or Urs Widmer, published throughout the last two and a half decades, from another angle for a change – as if those authors were Hoffer's successors.” Hermann Wallmann, WDR (West German Broadcasting)

Klaus Hoffer was born in Graz in 1942, and continues to live there as free-lance writer and translator. His main work Meeting the Bieresch was first published in 1980/83.

No other writer, with the possible exception of Helmut Qualtinger, has captured Austrian mentality – whether of intellectuals or the general populace – more accurately than the Carinthian-born Viennese resident Antonio Fian.

“To those who usually settle for the easy answer Probing Questions will come as a shock. It is Fian's running commentary on the status quo of Austria and the whole world. (…) Most of Fian's plays are based on quotations; from other people's forced seriousness his art springs. The Austrian “antipathetician” takes refuge in joking and, in this way, rescues us.” Paul Jandl, Neue Zürcher Zeitung
“Whether it is the VIPs or Mr. and Mrs. Jones he is pestering: thanks to his fine sense of humour, which makes you smile inside, his criticism, though sharp and biting, is at no point scathing. Antonio Fian's latest mini-dramas are out. Hurray!” Peter Pisa, Kurier

Born in the Carinthian town of Klagenfurt in 1956, Antonio Fian has lived in Vienna since 1976. At irregular intervals he comments on (predominantly) Austrian culture and society for which he was awarded the Austrian State Prize for Cultural Journalism in 1990.

Vienna in 1922. Balthasar Beck returns exhausted, but uninjured to his native Vienna and hesitates for several days before deciding to see his family. Haunted by harrowing memories of imprisonment, of the carnage and horrors of war, he has trouble readjusting to his former life. At his old job with the criminal investigation department, he is confronted with a series of mysterious and atrocious murders that seem somehow connected with the time just served in Siberia.

Ice Whispering captivates the reader with its intensity and the accuracy of its historical details: the climate of Vienna in the early 1920s – with people´s minds set as much on the recently abolished monarchy as on growing anti-Semitism –, the prisoner of war camps in the faraway East, the battles in the Russian steppes, disease, hunger, and misery. With her detached point of view, Balàka crafts all these elements into a highly sophisticated social panorama.

Prädikat: lesenswert (Jury ORF-Bestenliste)

A new novel by Thomas Stangl, winner of the prestigious »aspekte« literature award.

The reader is plunged into a frenzy of remembrances and fantasies of a mother and her daughter, and risks getting lost in them. The story is set in Leopoldstadt, a district of Vienna steeped in history, where Emilie and her daughter Dora have spent their entire lives – and do so until the very end. A splendid read that raises perception to a another dimension.

Telekom-Austria Preis 2007
Literaturpreis der deutschen Wirtschaft 2007

One is instantly consumed by the poetic and genuine language of these soliloquies whose narrator wishes that »all words were equally true and familiar«; and by saying so she brings up alienation (strangeness) between herself and the world, as it has not been brought up with such a serene melancholy, for quite a while. A light melancholic shade lies upon these pages, a thougtfulness almost forbidding determined action. These young towners see their »being-here« as a »good-bye exercise«.

»In a surprisingly authentic tone that doesn't chum up to anybody or anything, Andrea Winkler deals with what can be dealt with by poetic means.« (Der Standard)

Theodor-Körner Preis 2006
Stipendium der Hermann Lenz Stiftung 2006
Literaturpreis Wartholz 2008

Nina (»I am a boy. I am a girl. I don't know what I am. I cannot make up my mind. But since I'm both of them I am in an awkward position.«), Nina has a backpack full of paraphernalia she keeps carrying about, seventeen pieces altogether – a mouth organ among them, a water bottle, a lipstick and a walkman. That makes seventeen stories, at least seventeen convergences towards a person, seventeen sketches, at least, attempting to get hold of this character, to get behind her and/or his very history. In her subtile prose that defies imitation and avoids any definition, Eleonore Frey conjures up the world of a seventeen-year-old girl. It is an insecure, perilous, small yet complete world portrayed with sympathy from a distant, slightly ironic angle.

Mela Hartwig (1893-1967) is one of the great unknown authors, a modernist and feminist, whose career was destroyed by the nazis.
This book, her second novel, could not be published in its time; she was forced to emigrate, went to London, where she made friends with Virginia Woolf. She never returned but for short visits and stayed in England until her death.

Am I a useless person? is the story of an insignificant and most dispensable secretary without special abilities or talents who lives in a tragic and humiliating dependency from her erotic obsession. A pitiless description of the social situation of the late twenties in Vienna and a self-humiliation of its own kind.

A brilliant speech for an other quality of life, for reading, for slowness. Ilma Rakusa devotes to breakneck speed in the working world, in communications, in tourism and in entertainment and she askes finally: "How much speed can we handle?"

In the 1820s two little known travellers are on their way to what for Europeans is still a legerndary city: Timbuktu. One of them is Major Alexander Gordon Laing, who is leading a caravan from Tripolis across the Sahara; the other is René Caillié, who, without a commission or any support, is trying to travel as a Muslim, alone or with changing companions, from Senegal to the Niger. Not far apart, in 1826 and 1829, they each arrive at their desired destination to soon leave it again: the one, after unbearable hardships, reaches Marocco and later France; the other vanishes forever. Setting out for the unknown, daring an exploit, thinking in fantasies – in one word, storytelling. In a flood of imagery, in sweeping sentences of great density and suggestivity, Thomas Stangl fabricates a reality around the longing for the unknown at the crossroads between colonialism and private folly – an adventure novel after all adventure novels, one in witch the actual adventure takes place from one sentence to the next.

»A masterpiece!« (Roger Willemsen)
»A terrific novel« (Tilman Spreckelsen, FAZ)
»A wonderful book!« (Hardy Ruoss, Literaturclub)
»A sensationel debut« (Olga Martynova, Die Zeit)
»Congenial!« (Andreas Langenbacher, NZZ)

aspekte-price for the best debut 2004