All Blum really wants to do on Malta is sell his porno mags, but he suddenly finds himself in Frankfurt, in possession of five pounds of cocaine. His first thought is to sell it quickly, and open a beach bar on a Caribbean island. But then all sorts of things get in his way: his own naïveté, the captivating Cora, the dangerous Rossi, the inscrutable Mr. Haq, and the countless, cashless people interested in his snow.

»The frogs, too, only seemed to be croaking innocently in the swamps. In reality, everyone had a plan.«
Jörg Fauser

Jörg Fauser’s autobiographical masterpiece now in a new edition.

»That summer, drugs were cheaper than books, unless you wrote them yourself.«

Harry Gelb’s raw materials are opium on an Istanbul rooftop and LSD in a Berlin commune, heroin in a Göttingen garret and countless beers in the pubs of Frankfurt. Above all, however, his raw material is writing itself.

Fast-paced, brutally honest and funny, Fauser’s alter ego tells us of a dangerous and endangered youth and a man who never forgets – either as a night watchman or as an airport worker – what he wants to be: a writer.

With a foreword by Michael Köhlmeier, and an afterword by Matthias Penzel.

Jörg Fauser’s revealing columns: about the Tagesschau daily news programme and boxing matches, about a papal visit and democracy – and about the cultural sector. Now including afterwords by journalists Ambros Waibel and Werner Mathes.

»If you work for magazines, you’ll have money for a certain period of time to do your own thing, if you want to separate the two. But I don’t want to separate them. Ever since I’ve been a journalist, for me there is no separation,« says Jörg Fauser. 

This volume gathers together the pieces which the incorruptible (yet not unimpressionable) Fauser wrote under the pseudonym Caliban and under the column title As You Like It in the Berlin magazine tip.

»The captain was, you see, a picture-perfect captain [. . .] and his helper and general drudge was a picture-perfect helper with pockmarks and all, who answered to the name Manoli and smoked lights, because life really was hard enough, and the Naousa was a picture-perfect caique boat, her ten knots slicing through the Etesian winds, and it was of course a picture-perfect day on a pictureperfect sea, and later everyone held on tightly to their picture-perfect plastic bags.«
Mediterranean Sea Boat Tour

Harry Lipschitz, a left-leaning politico who’s got more to worry about than just his heart. Guido Franck, a Munich-based gallerist whose attempts to sail through life care-free have run aground. Natascha Liebling, an aging actress who travels the country with a provincial theatre troupe. All three of them are in a downward spiral. All is connected by the enigmatic Charles Kuhn, who »acts like a crook and talks like a philosopher«, and the ambitious journalist Vicky Borchers-Bohne. 

Jörg Fauser’s poems from the early years, 1974 to 1979, are political, intoxicated, romantic and revelatory – newly introduced with a foreword by author Björn Kuhligk.

»We were [. . .] rebuked again and again, accused of having dragged the poem out of its noble realm onto the landfill site, amongst the broken refrigerators, the rusted beer cans, the dirty undergarments. According to this world view, if one wants to call it that, our audience mainly consists of unwashed, uneducated louts, without history, without nation; of hash addicts, whores, junkies, rock’n’roll freaks, those who are hopeless and lost to society, devoid of any accomplishment, any future . . . In reality, of course, our audience – like that of our critics – is made up of shy shorthand typists, German teachers with two Siamese cats, and at least as many future pastoral ministers as customs inspectors. And a dangerous criminal here and there; it depends very much on whether people are given the opportunity to learn to read.« 
( Jörg Fauser in tip magazine 22 /1980)