Readux – Books from Berlin

If you’ve been reading the Readux website, where I’ve written some book reviews and essays over the past couple years, you already know it as being in touch with the German book scene. With the launch of Readux Books it has become part of that scene, publishing four short literary works three times a year.

The initial offering, due out in October 2013, is very promising, and contains a heavy dose of the publisher’s Berlin home base. In Berlin: Day and Night in 1929 by Franz Hessel comprises two essays delving into the city at an exciting and transitional period in its history. City of Rumor: The Compulsion to Write About Berlin by Gideon Lewis-Kraus is the sole English-language original of the group, recounting and exploring the writer’s three years in Berlin and “his shifting understanding of the city, its pitfalls and possibilities.”

The two fictional works are German writer Francis Nenik’s The Marvel of Biographical Bookkeeping, which is about the Czech poet Ivan Blatný and English poet Nicholas Moore, while the description on the publisher’s site of Fantasy by Swedish writer Malte Persson has already completely sold me on the story. A “sexy, troubling glimpse into the vacuum created when a fantasy collapses” – sounds good to me (or at least better than the merely troubling glimpses that I typically have when my fantasies collapse.)

And as you can see, the covers and design of these books is amazing.