Vintage International

3 total works

33 Moments of Happiness

by Ingo Schulze

Published 3 February 1998

Each episode in this dazzling debut collection captures the spark in some tiny detail of everyday life in contemporary St Petersburg and fans it into a story that flares with comedy, surreal passion, heartbreaking indifference and mad Russian excess. There's a Mafia shoot-out in a disco, as told by a gun-toting Walter Mitty simultaneously thrilled and horrified by the carnage he is creating. There are three devils who appear for an evening at the steam bath, their revelries ending in cannibalism - or is the watching manager just mad? These are sad, whimsical, macabre, bleakly funny stories, all told in a playful and voluptuous prose that is itself a homage to the great Russian masters whom Schulze is honouring - from Gogol to Pasternak, from Chekhov to Nabokov.

Simple Stories

by Ingo Schulze

Published 1 February 1998

Set in 1990, following the collapse of the Berlin Wall, Ingo Schulze presents scenes from post-unification life in the small Thuringian town of Altenburg. In a laconic, unsentimental style reminiscent of the stories of Raymond Carver, Schulze portrays a society marked by unemployment and casual racial violence. Ordinary life struggles to adapt in the aftermath of the Berlin Wall, where the deeds of the East-West past are no longer secret.

`Our new epic storyteller' Gunter Grass

New Lives

by Ingo Schulze

Published 1 January 2008

In his long-awaited new novel, renowned German author Ingo Schulze provides a rich and nuanced panorama of a world in transition.

East Germany, January 1990. Enrico Türmer–man of the theater, aspiring novelist–has turned his back on the art world and joined a startup newspaper. Before long, the former aesthete and rebel becomes obsessed with personal gain, and in a series of letters to his sister, a friend, and a would-be lover, Enrico vividly muses on his capitalist ventures and latent worldly ambitions. As Schulze peels away the layers of Enrico’s previous existence, his antihero’s reinvention comes to embody all the questionable aspects not only of life in the old Germany, but of life in the Germany just taking form.