Sombrero vom Himmel is Moloko’s German translation of Richard Brautigan’s Sombrero Fallout: A Japanese Novel. The novel, first published in 1976, follows three storylines that interact, entwine and hilariously spiral out of control. One storyline follows the hero, a heartbroken comedy writer, who has just discarded the opening sentences of a new story and finds himself tormented by memories and fantasies of a former…
On 7 and 8 October 2004 the Jornadas Oriente y Occidente took place in Seville, Spain. To that end organiser Emilio Gonzalez Ferrín had invited Thomas Stemmer, Juan Pacheco, Carmen Ruiz Bravo, Pedro Martinez Montavez, Eduardo Jorda, Ira Cohen, Axel Monte and Florian Vetsch. At that point Monte and…
Jerome Rothenberg was born into a Polish-Jewish family in New York City in 1931. He studied at the City College of New York and received a Master’s Degree in Literature from the University of Michigan in 1953. After his return from military service in Germany, Rothenberg resumed his studies at Columbia University, from which he graduated in 1959. His publishing career began in the late 1950s when he translated Paul Celan and Günter Grass and other…
German writer Jürgen Ploog (1935-2020) used to work as an airline pilot for 33 years. Consequently transience and crossing borders were integral to his existence and writings. Ploog’s early literary output gravitated naturally to the cut-up method that William Burroughs and Brion Gysin popularised in the 1960s . His early experiments at cut-ups were published in the satirical magazine Der Metzger and in the German Beat magazine…
Kiev Stingl’s Madalina – Der Verdammte der Insel is a story about loss, about a love that consumed itself in a passionate fire. Divided into four chapters named after the four seasons, Stingl’s main character and alter ego Gandolfo describes how his love affair with the young artist Mandalina sprouts, blooms, withers and dies as in an inevitable and natural cycle. The story, set in Berlin and on a Greek island…