Provokator - EU - Magazine

by Sezin Rajandran

There are some books created by Fate. Books that call upon the writer, move his hand, and assist in their own invention. These books have a life of their own, drawing readers to them. I am one such book.

You know me as The Devil’s Bible, the Codex Gigas, The Great Book, the largest book in medieval history. You know that my pages are made of the skins of 160 donkeys. My parchments are illuminated in the maroon of dried blood, the gold of the Sun, the black of dark moonless nights, the green of the earth from where I was born in the year 1229. 

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By Wendy Wrangham

Paradoxes abound in Clare Wigfall’s debut collection.  Unnerving yet empathic stories are executed with a deftness that bestows a tale’s essence morsel by morsel, sublimely whetting the appetite before ending abruptly, often without resolution but with a piquant twist.

Age-old fears (paranoia, independent women, the failure to protect) thread through the varied scenarios whether in a timeless Gaelic isle, an allegorical Hamelin, a besieged Paris or a road trip to Florida, and the macabre is touched on with disappearing babies, hastily buried bodies, incest, starvation and a shocking though unnamed crime that leaves a wife adrift.

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By Matej Harik

MOTHER NIGHT was first published in 1961. It's amazing how little things have changed. Mother's Night, the title of which is taken from Goethe's Faust, is a relatively short but very powerful novel

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by Paul Leppin
translated from German by Cynthia A. Klima
Afterword by Dierk O. Hoffmann

PUBLISHED BY TWISTED SPOON PRESS

€ paperback original, 189 pp.
€ price: 290, CZK
€ available in bookshops

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By: Jack Terricloth
Published by Gunner Records, 2007
84 pages
ISBN- 978-3-00-021799-9

      Eminently readable, fast-paced prose stories that chronicle a world of glamorous and rampant drug use, addicts, outcasts and punks prowling cities in the aftermath of failed revolutions, “The Collected Cloth” is the book the cool kids wanted to write in high school.
      The book is actually two books collected into one, hence the title. The first section, “Bakshish,” is a short story consisting of 43 pages and 13 ‘chapters’ that read more like episodes, polaroid pictures rather than fully-developed sections. The narrative itself, however, is developed, as are the characters. The story centers around Simon Grapelli, a young bartender eking out a living in an unnamed post-revolutionary city. When he is hired as an unwilling informant for the secret police, he finds his pockets fattened with cash enough to support the copious drug intake of both himself and his girlfriend Mary-Anne, as well as to pay for the tailored suits he’s always longed for but has never been able to afford.

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Reviewed by Brian L. Youngwright

There are countless things human beings are scared about, and most of these fears are universal - even if they tend to affect individual life in varying degrees and intensities. One person worries obsessively about the constant failure of relationships, the other about impending bankruptcy; one person is petrified by his seeming inability to live up to his own expectations, the other paralyzed by the idea of terrorist attacks. And on goes the list, ad infinitum. Often enough, even the best psychiatrist can provide only a limited cure.

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By Fiona Mizani 

Bordercrossing Berlin - The English Language Literary Magazine was launched on 2nd December 2006. The debut and second issues of this beautifully-designed, illustrated, 170 plus page publication are bringing to the attention of an interested German readership, as well as to the anglophone population, Berlin's importance as a hot-bed of English language literary talent at the beginning of the 21st century.

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German Literature

Ruhm by Daniel Kehlmann

What would happen if one day all the computers that manage telephone calls broke down and calls and messages began to arrive to the wrong destinations?

This is the starting point of Fame (Ruhm in German), the latest book by the German writer Daniel Kehlmann.

 A review by Juanjo Cubero

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