Dramaturgie im zeitgenössischen Tanz ist ? positiv gemeint ? ein heißes Eisen. Idealerweise sind Dramaturginnen und Dramaturgen während der Erarbeitung eines Stücks die besten Freunde der Choreografen.
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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 /
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A precision engineer of the emotions, Peter Nadas traces the European upheavals of the past century in his colossal and epic novel "Parallel Stories", which was published in English in December. The core and epicentre of the novel is the body, which bears the marks of history and trauma. In his seemingly chaotic intertwining of lives and stories, Nadas penetrates the depths of the human animal with unique insight. A review by Joachim Sartorius 
The USA and the USSR should not simply be thought of as arch enemies of the Cold War. Beyond ideology, the two nations were deeply interested in one another. Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov were thrilled by the American Way of Life in 1935/6, John Steinbeck and Robert Capa praised the sheer vitality of the Russian people in 1947. Historian Karl Schlögel reviews a perfect pair of travel journals. Photo by Ilf and Petrov.
Turkish-born author, actor and director Emine Sevgi Özdamar was recently awarded the Alice Salomon Prize for Poetics. Coming to West Berlin in 1965, Özdamar first learned German at the age of 19. After stage school she went on to become the directorial assistant to Benno Besson and Matthias Langhoff at the Volksbühne in East Berlin while still living in West Berlin. Harald Jähner warmly lauds the author's uniquely visual sense of her acquired language and her ability to overcome the seemingly insurmountable dividing line through the city.
Nadezhda Mandelstam's personal memories of the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, her intimate friend, offer a unique and moving testimony to friendship and resistance over decades of persecution. Published only after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, the text is still unavailable in English but has recently been translated into German. A unique historical document, celebrating an intellectual icon in an age of horror. Portrait of Akhmatova
This year is the 200th anniversary of the death of German writer Heinrich von Kleist. The author Gertrud Leutenegger has a very Kleistian afternoon on Elba, when she encounters the Marquise von O in the waiting room of a very strange eye doctor. 
Eugen Ruge has won the German Book Prize with his novel "In Zeiten des abnehmenden Lichts" (In times of fading light), an autobiographical story of an East German family. The award is presented to the best German-language novel just before the start of the Frankfurt Book Fair. Here we present this year's six shortlisted authors and exclusive English translations of excerpts from their novels.
Chinese dissident Liao Yiwu escaped into exile in Germany in July this year. His new book about his life in Chongqing prison has just been published in German as "Für Ein Lied und Hundert Lieder". Both book and author have a life-threatening odyssey behind them. I am overjoyed that Liao Yiwu is here with us and not at home in prison. By Herta Müller
No other European city suffered more in World War II than Leningrad under siege, when over a million people lost their lives. Russian literature delivers a rich testimony of the events which have been all but forgotten by the West. Only a few works, though, also do the disaster aesthetic justice. By Oleg Yuriev 
In this apology for the vice of reading, Bora Cosic describes the magnificent and fantastic discoveries of one of its practitioners – revealing how texts contain what we bring to them, how we sometimes read without reading and how books are not only found in books but many other places.Â
This year's German International Literature Award goes to "Venushaar", a Russian novel that starts out as a dialogue between an asylum seeker and an immigration officer, and opens into a vast choir of voices. A conversation with its author Mikhail Shishkin, a literary giant in his own country, and his German translator Andreas Tretner. By Ekkehard Knörer. (Image: Mikhail Shishkin © Yvonne Böhler)
Algeria's youth: Frustrated, isolated and in the stranglehold of clandestine political structures. Young Algerians are rebelling against being locked in traditional political and social structures, but have no chance of a national uprising like that in Tunisia, says Algerian author Boualem Sansal. An interview with Reiner Wandler. 
On what would have been Romanian philosopher E.M. Cioran's 100th birthday, Suhrkamp has published a volume of his essays from the 1930s, "Über Deutschland". Effervescing with enthusiasm for Hitler and fascist ideas, they cast a dark shadow over his later writing. Fritz Raddatz wishes he'd never had to read such abominations and bids a former companion a bitter farewell. Photo: E.M. Cioran © Surhrkamp Verlag
Andre Müller Germany's most insightful and most feared interviewer is dead. Elfriede Jelinek said of him in her obituary: "Andre Müller goes all the way into people and then he makes them into language, and only then do they become themselves." Read his interviews with Ingmar Bergman and Hitler's sculptor Arno Breker in English. Photo courtesy 
Serbia was the country in focus at this year's Leipzig Book Fair – its extensive literature seems to be bound up in the straitjacket of politics. Serbia is having a hard time with Europe, and Europe is having a hard time with Serbia. Although there are signs of a softening stance, the country is still locked up in the self-imposed nationalist isolation into which it manoeuvred itself as the aggressor in the Yugoslavian war of secession. A visit there inspires mixed feelings. By Jörg Plath