Treasure Chest

Franz Kafka not only wrote prose, he was also passionate about drawing: »Did you know I was once a great drawer,« he wrote about his artistic ambitions, half ironic, half proud, to his...

Eva Demski has been with her garden for fifty years now. Time to think about what things should be like moving forward. In her New Garden Stories, she talks about challenges she would never have dreamed of. It’s not just climate change and dealing with the fear of a virus that are giving her a hard time, but also her own age and box hedges that have been ripped out. The only thing that...

God wants it that way. The state wants it that way. Your father wants it that way. But why is there a superior, invisible entity that tells me what to do, what not to do, what to think, what to believe, which profession to have and whom to love? Anarchism puts us on a political and philosophical merry-go-round of which you don’t know when it will stop. Anarchism is not satisfied with...

»Thomas Bernhard is born in Heerlen (the Netherlands) on February 9, 1931. The afterbirth has the shape of Austria.« – thus begins Bernhard’s biography as drawn by comic artist Nicolas Mahler.

The grand master of minimalism, who has previously and »congenially« adapted Bernhard’s Old Masters and The World-Fixer, takes readers on a wickedly funny tour...

Dublin, June 16, 1904: a day in the life of the advertising agent Leopold Bloom and the sensations of the ordinary – James Joyce has created a maximal book from a minimum of matter:...

Sometimes, it just hits you and you don’t even know why. That’s when life seems nothing but chaotic, devastating and confusing. Fighting this, however, is profoundly pointless – and anything but funny. If, yet again, you’ve rushed into one of those crises at full throttle and can’t find your way out, you should take a look at The Little ABC of Survival. From »Age« to »Work«, from...

Marcel Proust’s Recherche is one of the most important French novels, if not the most important – reading it can be life changing. Nicolas Mahler’s comic is not a retelling, not a...

Despite the odds, a life which shouldn’t have been at all becomes colourful and exciting. Being a constant part of this life, farewells can be countered by encounters and stories though the feeling that this is all a game continues throughout unabated. Eva Demski gathers together others’ lives, those both known and unknown; leading lights of literature like Reich-Ranicki, Koeppen, Kempowski,...

In his brilliant new graphic novel Nicolas Mahler purges Frank Wedekind’s tragedies Earth Spirit und Pandora’s Box and creates a black comedy about the corporeality of women, the possessive mentality of men, and Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square.

Frank Wedekind’s man-eating Lulu once again finds herself in a Suprematist’s atelier. Struggling back and...