In Western culture, women are often linked with death, perhaps because they are traditionally constructed as an unknowable -other.- The first two Women and Death volumes investigate ideas about death and the feminine as represented in German culture since 1500, focusing, respectively, on the representation of women as victims and killers and the idea of the woman warrior, and confirming that women who kill or die violent or untimely deaths exercise fascination even as they pose a threat. The traditions of representation traced in the first two volumes, however, are largely patriarchal. What...

After the international success in the 1990s of authors such as Bernhard Schlink, Marcel Beyer, and Thomas Brussig, an impressive number of new German-language novelists are making a significant impact. Some, like Karen Duve, Daniel Kehlmann, and Sasa Stanisic, have achieved international recognition; some, like Julia Franck, have won major prizes; others, like Clemens Meyer, Alina Bronsky, and Ilja Trojanow, are truly -emerging authors- who have begun to attract attention. Between them they represent a range of literatures in German, from women's writing to minority writing (from Turkish...