Sep 23 2024
This first book in The Web Of The Spider series for middle grade readers could not come at a more relevant time! Young Rolf von Heusen is eleven years old in the spring of 1929. His main interests are football and palling around with his friends Ansel and Joshua. He thinks that his hometown of …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/09/23/rise-of-the-spider-by-michael-p-spradlin/
Sep 21 2024
Everybody who’s anybody among Berlin’s dead craves an invitation to Frau Altenshul’s salon. She has devoted her afterlife — much as she had devoted her life — to beauty, whether that was beautiful music, beautiful art, or the simple beauty of conversation among like-minded people. Max Liebermann was a painter who had lived a long life, …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/09/21/das-konzert-by-hartmut-lange/
Jun 23 2024
A hotel, especially a grand one in the center of a major metropolis, can be its own world. Vicki Baum opens up one such world in Menschen im Hotel (lit. “People in a Hotel” but published under the better title of Grand Hotel), telling interlocking stories of people in Berlin’s finest hotel over the course …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/06/23/menschen-im-hotel-by-vicki-baum/
Jun 15 2024
How much fury fits into 142 pages? Monika Maron tells her readers from the very first sentence that Herbert Beerenbaum dies, so a good bit of Stille Zeile Sechs (Silent Close Number Six — “Close” in the sense of a small cul-de-sac street, with six as the house number) is finding out who he his, how …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/06/15/stille-zeile-sechs-by-monika-maron/
Mar 02 2024
With Marzahn Mon Amour Katja Oskamp aims for a double re-evaluation: of her own writing, seemingly derailed after two novels and a story collection are followed by publishers’ rejections of the novellas that followed, and of the district of Marzahn in the northeastern corner of Berlin, far from the city’s hip party places or its …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/03/02/marzahn-mon-amour/
Feb 11 2024
Vasily Grossman is one of the great writers of the twentieth century, and The Road is a very good place to start reading his work. Born in the Ukrainian city of Berdychiv when it was part of the Russian Empire, Grossman experienced the Bolshevik Revolution and the ensuing civil war as a teen. He began …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/02/11/the-road-by-vasily-grossman/
Dec 01 2023
and illustrated by Bernd Kissel, subtitled “Du würdest es eh nicht glauben” — You Wouldn’t Believe it Anyway This second volume of the kangaroo comics concludes the hardback publication of the odd couple’s 2020–23 run in Germany’s leading intellectual weekly newspaper. There are some nice touches in the two volumes: the first is dedicated “For …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/12/01/die-kanguru-comics-2-written-by-marc-uwe-kling/
Sep 06 2023
and illustrated by Bernd Kessel One of twenty-first century Germany’s best-known characters is a kangaroo. Talking, obviously, but less obviously a Communist, a fan of Nirvana (“The band?” asks Marc-Uwe Kling, narrator of the stories. “No, the Beyond,” says the kangaroo, and after a pause, “Of course the band! You like to pose unnecessary questions!” …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/09/06/die-kanguru-comics-written-by-marc-uwe-kling/
Aug 25 2023
Thirty years ago this spring I read half of Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain) during travels in southern Europe and stopped when I was no longer spending long stretches of time on busses or ferries, waiting for same, or otherwise doing the things that young people do when they have plenty of time and little …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/08/25/der-zauberberg-by-thomas-mann/
Apr 30 2023
The title of Katja Berlin’s book translates as Things for Which Women Have to Justify Themselves, and the cover shows a circle divided into four equal parts. They are labeled “Only children,” “Only career,” “Children and career,” and “No children and no career.” She is the creator of a pointedly humorous set of graphs that …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/04/30/wofur-frauen-sich-rechtfertigen-mussen-by-katja-berlin/
Al Singh
Doug Merrill
Doreen Sheridan
Emily Lauer
John Pitzel
Lars N. Goldschlager
Laura Eilers
Professor X
Robert Maedgen
Sylvere Ap Leanan
The Shire