Los Angeles, 1959. The aging filmmaker Curtis Melnitz is tormented by nightmares. He is in dire need of sleeping pills – but can only get them if he regularly visits the psychoanalyst. On the analyst’s couch, he reluctantly recounts the story of his life, from Hollywood to Berlin, from the black-and-white, silent dream factory to the garish and glaring German reality of the early 20th century. A chapter for every appointment on the couch. A life like a novel.

How does a novel come into being? How do characters become lifelike and alive? What does ›to condense one’s style‹ mean? And how do you tackle crises? Using his own work, and other well-known works as examples, Benedict Wells tells of the magic and fascination of writing. But The Stories Inside Us is also a personal foray from his childhood to his first publications. A wise and moving book.
 

Donna Leon has led an adventurous life, and with her tell-tale knack for observation, she turns her experiences in America, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Italy (of course) and Switzerland into a captivating read. She takes us on a journey around the world, from growing up on a farm, to curfew pajama parties in Iran, financial straits, and a Fiat 600. And we join Donna as she arrives in Italy as a chaperone, as she hunts for the perfect cappuccino, and as she encounters small marvels in the mountains.

»There is no worse crime than not having loved.«
Donna Leon

Revenge fantasies, first love, and the omnipotence of the imagination. This is the story of thirteen-year-old Blue, who lost her father early in life, whose mother lives in her own world, and who falls in love with someone obsessed with the same book as her: ›The Wizard of Oz‹. Like Dorothy in the book, Blue sets out to find some new kind of home on the other side of the rainbow – as well as her father’s murderer. A search that leads us to a completely different place than we expected.

The history of the >Magic Mountain< in its entirety: from the early days of Davos, via Thomas Mann, to the World Economic Forum. An expansive panorama of 20th Century history.

A lovesick narrator journeys with his daughter to snowy Davos. Their ›family vacation‹ becomes an enjoyable meditation on the effects of the modern age, skiing and the tuberculosis pandemic. Ohler also explores how a poor mountain village became the symbol of global wealth. And, just like in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, the truly difficult questions emerge amid the masses of snow: In what way do our ways of life need to change? And what kind of world are we passing on to our children?

Three stories which are kindled by photographs, yet at the same time transcend them, for they bring the depicted scenes back to life. ›The photographer of Auschwitz‹ The story of Wilhelm Brasse, the Auschwitz inmate and ›camp photographer‹ who became known worldwide. One of his photographs achieved international renown. ›The Klagsbrunn Family‹ The rise, alienation, flight and resistance of the Jewish Klagsbrunn family. ›Tschofenigweg‹ On the search for clues about the Austrian woman Gisela Tschofenig, who had to hold her wedding in Dachau concentration camp.

»Philosophizing is the reconciliation of a revelation that never took place. The path to it is full of astute human wisdom«, relates Marcuse in his ›History of Philosophy‹ in which he makes his readers aware of the »great harvest of thought«.

The stories of Lektro, this touching character – despite the fact that he is the best electro-mobile driver far and wide. No other driver can negotiate such narrow curves and whistle the song about Loreley so magnificently. When the air flickers in the heat of summer, he sits down among the flowers watches the clouds fly by and has beautiful thoughts…

From the eerily outlandish (a man suffocated by countless snails) to the irrational and brutal (a child's revenge on his mother for cooking his pet turtle), ›The Snail Watcher‹ presents a gallery of bizarre characters, each driven by strange, unspoken urges.

Those who shout abuse at a cat must be prepared for everything, maybe even for the cat putting a spell on them … A modern fairytale with all the typical ingredients: tests of courage, seductions, incantations – and a silly protagonist who turns out to be wise in the end.

»Beware the pronouncements of the critic« is the warning message of ›Depth Wish‹ in which a promising young painter takes her notices catastrophically to heart. In ›A Battle‹ bystanders want a nonchalant, elegantly dressed challenger to beat their ugly little local chess matador who has doggedly defeated them over the years, but what exactly is the newcomer up to with his breathtaking Napoleonic flair at the chessboard? In ›Maître Mussard's Bequest‹ a man develops a world view that renders him all too soon - and all too literally - petrified. In ›Amnesia in Litteris‹, Patrick Suskind's hilarious and compelling concluding piece, the author recounts a great forgetting as he browses through his own well-loved library and discovers how few of the books can actually remember. In this exquisite collection, Patrick Suskind's genius for unmasking self-deception and dramatising human obsession is once again beautifully demonstrated.

A boy’s village childhood with all the traditional attributes – father, mother, brother, sister, a house on a lake, tree-climbing, going to the races, music lessons, a bicycle, a crush on a girl in the class – is bedevilled by the mystifying appearances of the eccentric Mr Sommer. Moving through the landscape in silent haste, like a man possessed, with his empty rucksack and his long, odd-looking walking stick, Mr Sommer runs like a black thread through the boy’s days. Sempe’s light, caricatural illustrations perfectly capture both the humour and the gravity of Süskind’s tale.

For all those who have always shied away from the sheer length of the original Urs Widmer has carefully abridged the wonderful Tales From the Arabian Nights while preserving their oriental flavour. Highly vivid and amusing, he recounts the six most famous tales of the immortal Sheherazade: The Fisherman and the Jinni, Alibaba and the Forty Thieves, Aladdin and the Magic Lamp, The Magic Horse, The Adventures of Haroun-al-Raschid, and Sinbad the Sailor.
As Hermann Hesse pointed out, the original of this great collection of fairytales is »a source of infinite pleasures and the most opulent picture book in the world«. To ensure that this holds true, Tatjana Hauptmann has richly illustrated this work, conveying Oriental lavishness and subtlety.

Here he is one more time with new adventures – the short lovable man with his uniform cap and his old-fashioned metal-rimmed glasses. From behind their round lenses, he amiably smiles at everyone he encounters. He quickly came to symbolise a longing for a better life, for peace, freedom and an ideal world.

›The thing looked bluish-white, was about fifteen centimetres high, rounded at the top with what looked like a convolution or crease half way down it that disappeared in the earth. (…) Oktavian returned to the gravediggers, and realized that he had been holding his breath. He supposed, he was almost sure, that the growths out there in the darkness were highly contaminous. They would combine the carcinogens injected by the doctors as well as the original berserk cells that had caused the cancer. How large would they become? And what was nourishing them? Terrifying questions! Oktavian, like most medical students, sent chums an odd part of the human anatomy once in a while. It was almost a token of affection when a fellow received such a present in the post from a girl student, but something like this? No.‹ Grotesque ulcerations, which grow to immense sizes; huge cockroaches resistant to all forms of insecticides, which take over the control of a New York apartment building; whales, the pope, a weapon-loving US president – all provide the material of which modern (natural and unnatural) catastrophes are made.