Keep looking!
Strange, isn’t it: We have more, much more to do than before Corona. We realized all books planned, even 3 additional titles. Everything has changed, all that has been learned in 27 years of publishing is totally new each day.—Are we prepared to the New? And wasn’t it exactly the New, the curiosity about »News« that inspired the founding of a… MORE
Authors & Books
Embracing The Storm (Das Gewitter umarmen)
Short Prose
- Volume 2
- Edition Darmstädter Textwerkstatt (Darmstadt Text Workshop edition)
- Published by and with preface of
- Kurt Drawert
- 160 pages
- Hardcover
- With bookmark
978-3-86638-371-5
Volume 2 of the edition Darmstädter Textwerkstatt brings together short prose works by Christoph Wirges. In keeping with the concept of the edition, the volume is the first independent publication by the Mainz-based author. Most of the texts were written in Kurt Drawert’s Darmstadt Text Workshop, the editor of the series.
The first half of the volume presents laconic micro-stories in which we encounter bizarre male characters and revenants. In rapid succession, the overlapping images create an absurd cosmos of manhood and humanity. – The prose poems in the second part combine extreme condensation, flâneur-like reflection, and lyrical chronicle into a persistent tangle. They playfully confront the impositions of the contemporary world and develop a time-critical poetic of entanglement.
It is the attitude of the incidental, the comical, the somehow unconventional and slightly off-kilter that makes up the charm of these short (and truly shortest possible) stories, which are sometimes closer to poetry than to the epic sentence of prose. Nevertheless, despite the sometimes pointedly exaggerated situational comedy, there is a crack in the surface of the texts that reveals the abyss; it is the real, the absurd, the unpredictable, which can never be completely controlled and managed, no matter how much modern technologies claim to do just that: to create a transparent world, efficient in its processes and transparent in its mechanics. Subcutaneously, these little, to use Günter Eich’s word, »moles« of language undermine the prevailing order of a social grammar in which conditions are inscribed. The absurd is always an attack on the «zeitgeist« – Kurt Drawert in his preface.
Many thanks to Lisa Weber for the cover image.
The publisher, editor, and author would like to express their sincere gratitude to the Science City Darmstadt for its support!
