Alexander Booth

A novel at once about social justice, romance, and Gramsci. Is it possible to fight for social justice if you’ve never really loved another person? Can you save a country if you’re in love? Forty-six-year-old Anton Stöver’s marriage is broken. His affairs are a thing of the past, and his career at the university has reached a dead end. One...

An engaging exploration of romance focusing on disparate ages of lovers. Sunday evening, Tegel Airport, Berlin: A woman strikes up a conversation with a man, Robert Sturm, who is thirty-six years old and eighteen years her junior. He is on his way to Siberia and will return the following Saturday. She cannot wait... In 1981 she came to West Berlin...

An intellectually stimulating yet accessible collection of short vignettes on Russia and Germany by Alexander Kluge. Not just in light of a contested pipeline during the war in Ukraine, but also after centuries of both exchange and rejection, Russia and Germany were and are as far away from each other as they are intrinsically linked. The geopolitical present seems critical,...

A highly engaging exploration of existential questions, written in the midst of the Coronavirus pandemic. The Book of Commentary / Unquiet Garden of the Soul confronts the reader with questions of existential meaning, questions rendered all the more potent by the backdrop of the Coronavirus pandemic: How fragile are we as human beings? How fragile are our societies? What is...

Poetic prose meditations translated superbly into English. Austrian poet Friederike Mayröcker is widely considered one of the most important European poets of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The last book of hers to be published during her lifetime, as mornings and mossgreen I. Step to the window, is an elliptical and, if at times cryptic, deeply personal, playful, and highly...