Hydre Éditions – Foreign Rights Catalogue 24/25

2024|25

Foreign Rights

About Hydre Éditions Hydre Éditions is a small bilingual publishing house from Luxembourg, named after the Hydra of Lerna, the many-headed water snake from Greek mythology. Since its foundation in 2012, Hydre has published literary fiction in German and French. Recently, its programme has focused on novels, plays, novellas and short story collections, with publications by both confirmed writers and an emerging generation of Luxembourgian authors.

For foreign rights enquiries related to French and German translations, please contact: Stefanie Drews Agency 3, rue Plumet 75015 Paris France stefanie.drews@orange.fr +33 6 89 33 21 76 For all other enquiries, please contact: Hydre Éditions 12, rue Biergerkräiz 8120 Bridel Luxembourg info@hydreditions.eu https://hydredition.eu

Contents Wild Notions and Silver Linings 4 Story Blazons 6 My Island 8 Honourable Brasius 10 BUG: 010000100101010101000111 12 The Ballad of Lucy Jordan 14 My Life in Tents 16 Commuter 18 Céruse 20 The War of Time 22 The Mutations 24 Sabotage 26 The Bubbles 28 Falling from Various Heights 30 Larvae 32

Luc François Wild Notions and Silver Linings Wild Notions and Silver Linings is a collection of twelve short stories spanning the whole gamut of speculative fiction.

Luc François tells of visionaries and madmen who risk everything for their ideas, of those who are scarred or bleeding to death and hope to save at least one thing, of those who seek treasures on earth and those who hide among the stars. Encompassing a wide range of styles and genres, the stories of Wild Notions and Silver Linings revolve around the motifs of deception and unexpected glimmers of hope.

Original title: Hirngepinste und Silberstreife Language: German Genre: short stories Year: 2023 204 pp., 140 × 215 mm, 17 € ISBN: 978-99987-755-1-0 Rights available: worldwide

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I

t took me some effort to pull the plaster off my forehead and step excerpt in front of the mirror again. At first glance, there was nothing there at all; the person in the mirror was clearly me, as I knew myself. A head that had only the usual orifices: mouth, nose, eyes, ears. I could not, however, breathe a sigh of relief. After all, I still had the real test ahead of me, as I realised when I looked at my thumb. I remembered roughly where I had drilled the nail into the skin the night before, even though it had not left a wound or even a mark.

The spot was found after a short search, the horror reproduced: for the second time, I looked inside my skull.

It was real. I tried to make myself aware of it by repeating the words. My eyes believed me, the sinking feeling in my stomach believed me, my trembling legs believed me anyway. Only my mind, of all things, which was supposed to recognise its own image effortlessly, resisted. Nonsense, it decided. All just a fantasy.

© Elena Arens

Luc François, born in 1993 Luxembourg, is an writer and singer in the progressive metal band Mindpatrol. He has self-published several novels to date, all of which can be classified as speculative fiction and some of which are thematically linked to Mindpatrol's albums. In 2023, his crime novel Wasserstand was published by Kremart Edition, with which François was shortlisted for the Lëtzebuerger Buchpräis. He is also active as a music critic and poetry slammer.

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Jean Sorrente Story Blazons Story Blazons is a collection of microfictions detailing the lives or more or less ordinary people, observing their habits, desires and errors.

Fictions, whether read out of order or not, relate to the art of combinatorics. They are bound together by a secret alchemy that is not merely thematic. Stories come from the novel, insofar as they have been seen, heard and/or experienced. They involve characters, plot and drama. They have symbolic, even allegorical connotations. What makes characters act in the light of their tribulations and crossed destinies? Desire, the driving force behind all mimesis. Here are a few examples.

Original title: Blasons d’histoires Language: French Genre: short stories Year: 2023 236 pp., 140 × 215 mm, 18 € ISBN: 978-99987-88-37-4 Rights available: worldwide

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A

T the Lotophage, Edgar always sat at the same table by the win-

dow. He’d order a drink, take out his pencil and hardcover notebook from his pocket, open it to a blank page and write. The hubbub, the clinking of glasses, the music from the jukebox, sometimes loud, sometimes muted, the comings and goings of the waiters, helped his concentration, which was barely disturbed by the icy draught that rushed in with the customers entering the room.

Edgar never neglected to look at people, strangers and acquaintances, including his colleagues, noting details and moods. From time to time, he raised his wine glass to his lips and dipped into the bowl of seasoned olives. Seeing, hearing, tasting, touching and writing about it all seemed to summon all the senses and achieve something of the Baudelairian synesthesia he spoke of in his lectures. Indeed, he cultivated, or rather fetishized, the romantic fury of the poet, who, on nights haunted by evil dreams, wanders off and delves into the mystery of his inspiration.

© Philippe Matsas

Jean Sorrente, born in 1954 in Luxembourg, is a novelist, poet and essayist who questions the relationship between reality and fiction and probes narrative structures. For his fiction, he has been awarded the Prix Tony-Bourg, the Prix de la Libre Académie de Belgique as well as the Prix Servais.

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Raoul Biltgen My Island My Island is the tragicomic story of a castaway obsessed with defending his possessions against (imaginary) intruders on his desert island.

On a desert island, a man stands on the beach and tells a joke about a man standing on the beach on a desert island. He has nothing to laugh about. The castaway, who was once called Jean-Marie and now calls himself Robinson, has created a new life for himself: he has stockpiled supplies, built a hut – and erected fences. Because no one is supposed to take away the property he has so painstakingly amassed. Pirates, for example. Or even cannibals, as with Robinson Crusoe. Who knows how long you remain alone on a desert island?

Original title: Meine Insel. Eine Robinsonade Language: German Genre: novel Year: 2023 216 pp., 140 × 215 mm, 17 € ISBN: 978-99987-883-6-7 Rights available: worldwide

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R

OBINSON.

excerpt

That’s the first word on his inventory list.

Robinson’s inventory list.

Inventory is the second word.

He doesn't just own the list, he owns himself. He has himself.

Robinson. That’s who he is. He owns himself. Just like the potatoes.

Just like the pants, the brains, the shirt, the knife made of stone and the many knives made of shells. A roof, a goat, a garden, apple trees, a flute, second pair of pants, umbrella, hat, parasol, hat, hat, bottle […], spear, fire, pot, slingshot, bird's head, nuts, berries, oak beasts.

His. Fence.

Flowers in front of the house.

A ladder to get over the fence.

Robinson’s fence is high and has no door. That has something to do with security. It must be high, the fence, because Robinson doesn’t want to wake up one day and see people taking his belongings out to sea, and he’s lying there with nothing, absolutely nothing.

He still has himself.

And the list, maybe they leave it, so he can remember what he used to have. Out of pure spite. Pirates.

© Philippe Matsas

Raoul Biltgen, born in 1974 in Esch/Alzette, lives and works as a freelance writer, theater maker and psychotherapist in Austria. He has published short stories, novels and poems. His plays, many of them for children and young people, are regularly performed in German-speaking countries.

He has been awarded, among others, the Dutch-German Kinder- und Jugenddramatikerpreis 2017, the Glauser Prize 2021 in the Kurzkrimi (short crime fiction) category, and the Youth Jury Prize at the Mülheimer Theatertage 2022.

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Florent Toniello Honourable Brasius Honourable Brasius is a collection of five science-fiction short stories that mix the uncanny and the quotidian, future worlds and today’s Luxembourg.

Sorcerer, celestial tramp, usurper? In any case, for those who call on his services, blind Brasius is the ‘honourable one’. With his dog Enza, he untangles the web of problems that only the supernatural can solve or explain. A gift that excuses many faults … such as his grumpiness and vulgar language. In the uncertain future in which these two evolve, the genetic engineering of cows has led to a very peculiar civilisation on Callisto, and space mining operations could well endanger the entire Earth. Five short stories, linked by the strange, that question the future of humanity.

Original title: Honorable Brasius Language: French Genre: short stories Year: 2023 128 pp., 140 × 215 mm, 15 € ISBN: 978-99987-883-5-0 Rights available: worldwide

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‘I

S this your first time landing on Callisto?’ The controller scrutinizes

me with her eyes … may I describe them as bovine? The term would be rigorously accurate, but here, one could misunderstand the meaning of the word. I’m lingering a little too long on the teats peeking out from under her flowing toga. Has she noticed? In any case, she seems in no hurry to break the silence. Still, I think it prudent to raise my gaze to hers, smiling automatically. Of course, I’d expected her appearance; only, being in the presence of one of our wealthy sponsors is something quite different from ogling videos.

My eyes again escape my control to search beneath her abundant red hair for the trace of microhorns.

‘Mr Reynert?’

I swallow my saliva as discreetly as possible. She shakes her ears, a little slender but barely hairy. I hope this gesture is just a reflex and doesn’t betray any irritation. I need to regain my composure immediately. I conjure up the least suggestive images and stop at that of Miss Defrez, my elementary school teacher, with her enormous mole from which protruded witch’s hairs of a white bordering on transparent. If that doesn’t put an end to my fantasies … I slowly inhale a whiff of quasi-terrestrial atmosphere, then fall back on the boilerplate excuse: ‘Sorry, the fresh air’s making my head spin a little.’

© Paulo Lobo

Florent Toniello, born in Lyon in 1972, worked as an IT manager for a multinational company in Belgium and France before settling in Luxembourg as a proofreader and journalist in 2012. His favourite reading material is poetry and fantasy literature, to which he devotes articles in magazines and on his blog accrocstich.es, while also publishing poetry collections in Luxembourg, France and Belgium. As this book proves, he also ventures into writing stories where science fiction vies with the uncanny.

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Claire Schmartz BUG: 010000100101010101000111 In BUG, the communication between man and machine breaks down to reveal the flaws of human psychology.

The Professore is a top researcher. Her latest project is the intelligent robot BUD, with whose prototype she has just moved into a new apartment for testing purposes. Under the gaze of her colleagues at the House of Machines, the protagonist works tirelessly to put the finishing touches on BUD’s program. She wants the robot to be perfect, her masterpiece. But something is wrong with its algorithms; there is a bug. BUD makes inexplicable mistakes, which his mistress tries to correct with ever more drastic measures. Between limitless possibilities and the confined space of an apartment, between perfectionism and paranoia, she is losing control ...

Original title: BUG. 010000100101010101000111 Language: German Genre: novel Year: 2022 192 pp., 140 × 215 mm, 17 € ISBN: 978-99987-883-4-3 Rights available: worldwide

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T

HE Professore’s robot was a masterpiece! He had a fine face with

gentle features, a mask made of silicone with large eyes and a small mouth painted on it, a stub nose, and soft hands as if made of human skin. He could move with his two legs, which greatly extended his range, but he could also roll along the floor, so his quietness recommended him especially for everyday use and home use. He understood what was said around him and could follow commands up to complexity level C2; he had an active vocabulary of two thousand words relating to the household and everyday topics and excelled at talking about the weather based on clouds, air pressure, and wind conditions. He reminded one of arrangements, birthdays, and resolutions, doctor’s appointments, and implemented general advice on balanced life hygiene. He stored habits: he brought coffee to bed and in the evening a toothbrush, even if the Professore occasionally wanted to forget it. He could make suggestions: films, music, events, purchases that matched his owner’s continuously determined tastes. He tried out new recipes. In short, he was the perfect companion. Attentive but enigmatic, beautiful and kind to look at with his big eyes, practical and so small that he could be used anywhere! BUD reached the farthest shelves in the kitchen, tidied and swept and cleaned, folded back the edges of the carpet and ordered fresh cut flowers.

© Pitt Simon

Claire Schmartz, born in Luxembourg in 1992, lives and works in Berlin as a literary translator and freelance journalist. Her literary texts have been awarded the Concours littéraire national and appeared in the Cahiers luxembourgeois. In 2020, she was a fellow of the Georges Arthur Goldschmidt Program for Young Literary Translators. BUG is her first novel.

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Tullio Forgiarini The Ballad of Lucy Jordan A 67-year-old woman decides to leave her traditional life behind her and go on a road trip to Paris to indulge in all the pleasures she has been denied so far.

Lucy Jordan, a woman of sixty-seven years and Catholic education, keeps taking aside her mysterious interlocutor to tell him about her recent transformation. After having one of her heart valves replaced with that of a pig, she resolved, as if the pig had taken the decision for her, to quit everything – her husband, her house, her dull bourgeois life – and drive to Paris, where she met allies and experienced sensations she hadn’t thought she was still capable of experiencing.

Only, to do so, she needed a driving license, a car and some money.

In a lively, rhythmic and immersive style, Tullio Forgiarini lets us hear the voice of an ordinary woman who decides she has had enough.

Original title: La Ballade de Lucienne Jourdain Language: French Genre: novel Year: 2022 96 pp., 140 × 215 mm, 14 € ISBN: 978-99987-883-2-9 Rights available: worldwide Foreign sales: Greece (World Books)

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A

LL of this is the pig’s fault! I’m sure of it now. At first, I didn’t make

the connection, I really wasn’t in the mood to do so, but with all that’s been going on these last few days, I’ve thought about it a lot and I don’t see any other explanation. No, don’t say anything! I’m not interested in your opinion on this matter. Anymore. Not interested anymore. Here’s what I think: from the time Jesus allowed demons to enter pigs, they’ve stayed. And I’ve caught one myself, or at least part of one, during the operation. It’s been two years now, exactly one week before my sixty-fifth birthday. You don’t have a choice: you will listen to me and you will listen carefully. After all, that’s your reason for being here, and this affair with the pig is of your concern too.

© Pitt Simon

Tullio Forgiarini was born in Luxembourg in 1966 to an Italian father and a Luxembourgian mother. He writes noir fiction, mostly in French. Amok, his first novel in Luxembourgish, was awarded the European Union Prize for Literature, translated into several major languages and adapted for the screen as Baby(a)lone.

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Jeff Schinker My Life in Tents My Life in Tents combines autobiography, dystopia and music festival anecdotes in a rambunctious tale that is at times hilarious and at times heart-wrenching.

A (no longer so) young man whose past overlaps in part with the author’s withdraws from a world on the verge of collapse to live in the forest. In the summer, he goes back out to tour the music festivals that marked his youth. Back in his tent, whose walls he gradually covers with a final text, he recalls his festival life, marked by a first love with a traumatic outcome, the acquaintances that were made and the wild odysseys of a circle of friends who, out of a passion for music and a desire to have one’s senses deranged, wander the roads of Europe to naively seek refuge from a drifting world.

Original title: Ma vie sous les tentes Language: French Genre: novel Year: 2021 312 pp., 140 × 215 mm, 22 € ISBN: 978-99987-883-0-5 Rights available: worldwide

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‘I

’M too old to sleep in tents.’ Tiana was holding a plastic mallet excerpt which, at first sight, one could take to be one of those life-size toys that allow children to think they’re already adults (poor them) and the toy companies to fill their pockets, but which, in reality (I’m well-versed in these matters), are used to drive into the earth, whether it is loose and not very resistant or on the contrary dry and fiendishly recalcitrant, the stakes that will ensure the stability of your tent. Or not.

This mallet, she sometimes twirled it in the air, sometimes swung it from one hand to the other, expressing her weariness of being there, under a forest of birches, watching me once again unroll, under my expert airs, the various tarps and canvases and stakes and other pieces whose future use seemed obscure to me, these pieces looking me up and down almost as if to mock my lack of expertise in the matter or to confirm that they had been insidiously slipped in among the assembly materials in order to taunt the tent’s owner to succeed in separating the wheat from the chaff, the true from the false, the useful from the cumbersome, causing many fits of rage and madness on many a campsite, in many a forest or on many a festival ground.

© Baudouin Schinker

Jeff Schinker, born in 1985, is a writer and the head of the cultural pages of the daily newspaper Tageblatt. He also organises a series of readings with formal constraints.

His debut novella Retrouvailles was published by Hydre Éditions in 2015. His next book, Sabotage – a work in four languages – was nominated for the Prix Servais, the Lëtzebuerger Buchpräis and the European Union Prize for Literature.

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Jean Portante Commuter Commuter is a dense and poetic interior monologue that superimposes the stories of commuters, migrants and refugees.

The story takes place in the mind of an imaginary commuter who, like his Italian immigrant father before him, crosses the border between Lorraine and Luxembourg on a daily basis. Caught in the inevitable traffic jam on the motorway leading north, the son starts dreaming. He is swayed by memories and thoughts related to his father and mother and to migration and borders in general. While mythology is never far away, the text weaves a spider’s web in which each thread intertwines temporal and spatial layers to create a world where the family history of crossing the Alps joins the tragedy of the long caravans of refugees. Commuter thus becomes a desperate cry against the walls that are rising everywhere today.

Original title: Frontalier Language: French Genre: play / poetry Year: 2021 88 pp., 140 × 215 mm, 12 € ISBN: 978-2-9199541-7-9 Rights available: worldwide

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I

READ somewhere that in order to grow a garden you must have a

piece of land and eternity / and in order to build a cemetery / I didn’t read that anywhere / you must have a piece of the Mediterranean and a shipwreck / and fear / and hunger / and fingernails pulled out / Sir / and you must have seen it with your own eyes / and in order to become a commuter you have to light and then extinguish a blast furnace / when the smoke no longer speaks in the clouds / and when the dust no longer descends on the city / the journey starts again / we take the hand that no one is offering / is it calloused / has it held the stock of a rifle / or a shovel or a pickaxe / is it throwing a bottle into the sea / who will catch it on the other side / there are so many bodies to be fished out Sir …

The shovel and pickaxe are now in my grandfather’s hands / my grandfather’s hands are underground / they rarely see the daylight / they have dirt under their fingernails / they came from far away / they came from the sun / from the fig tree / and now they’re in the shadows / they pull out blocks of ore from the rock / there are no borders under the earth / we dig like moles / are we still on this side or already on the other / and where are the hands when the block crushes them / that’s how my story began / with crushed hands and body under a rock

© Florence Barataud

Jean Portante was born to Italian parents in Differdange in 1953 and lives in Paris. His work comprises around forty books – poetry, novels, essays, plays – and has been translated frequently. He received, among others, the French Prix Mallarmé and the Luxembourgian Prix Batty Weber for his lifetime achievement.

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Tullio Forgiarini Céruse Céruse is a thriller about a ghostwriter tasked with completing the memoirs of a dying magnate as the lines between writing and reality become blurred.

Nino Bianchi is a writer of relative talent and success who, following legal problems that cost him his teaching job, is forced to sell his services as a ghostwriter to celebrities who want to write their memoirs.

One of them, old Céruse, a wealthy businessman, has built his empire on brutality and fear. In interviews with Bianchi, Céruse omits no sordid detail, as if being remembered as the archetypal bastard were his ultimate goal. That such a book could see the light of day is not to everyone's liking. Bianchi receives visits from strange individuals. All of them invite him to think about the consequences of what he is writing. The further he advances in Céruse’s life, the more he feels his own life slipping away from him. The characters’ contours become blurred, the chronology is diluted and, in the end, Bianchi finds it hard to tell the difference between what is and what is written.

Original title: Céruse Language: French Genre: novel Year: 2020 188 pp., 140 × 215 mm, 16 € ISBN: 978-2-9199541-6-2 Rights available: worldwide Foreign sales: Turkey (New Human)

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I

’VE been meeting with Céruse for two weeks. I have no choice. excerpt Since I lost my teaching job, I’m forced to live off my writing. And what I usually write – novels, plays – has never earned much. So I’ve started writing for other people. That former racing cyclist, for instance. A champion. He never quite won the Tour de France, but almost. A charming guy. The publisher wanted a tasteful book, full of photos. With ‘snappy, vibrant’ prose. I wrote the text, wondering what he meant by ‘vibrant’. So I described the dark light in the depths of his eyes, the sad smile conveying the useless beauty of a feat that he couldn’t help but perform; I saw in him a sacrificial beast burning on the Galibier slopes so that he might share a moment of sublimity with us powerless spectators; I compared him to Sisyphus, and, quoting Camus, I ended by saying that one must imagine him happy.

I delivered it by the deadline, and the racing cyclist and the publisher were both very satisfied. I was properly paid, and the book was a great success. My name appeared nowhere. I had several more commissions of this sort. Then, two weeks ago, there was Céruse.

Translated from the French by Anna Leader

© Pitt Simon

Tullio Forgiarini was born in Luxembourg in 1966 to an Italian father and a Luxembourgian mother. He writes noir fiction, mostly in French. Amok, his first novel in Luxembourgish, was awarded the European Union Prize for Literature, translated into several major languages and adapted for the screen as Baby(a)lone.

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Jean Sorrente The War of Time This novel examines the history of a Belgian family from the East Cantons, tempted and destroyed by Nazism, over a period of seventy years.

Revisiting various places from Paris to Berlin via Malmedy, Liège and Salonica, moving between different eras from the 1930s to the the late 1990s like scenes from the theatre of memory, The War of Time describes the seduction that an ideology can exert and tracks down its survival and extension in other forms.

Original title: La Guerre du temps Language: French Genre: novel Year: 2020 476 pp., 140 × 215 mm, 24 € ISBN: 978-2-91-995415-5 Rights available: worldwide

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J

UST like war, interrupted me Morel, impatient to add his grain of

salt, isn’t that talking about what you haven’t experienced? – It’s not about not having lived it, it’s more about transposing, translating, analysing it, examining how you feel about this heritage. Heritage. I thought of Alphonse’s enlistment, he had volunteered, about his choices, which were far from innocent. The sabotage operations must have been deadly and, without a doubt, the fight against partisans had also targeted Jews. He had become a radio operator, eventually, sending and receiving messages, orders, decrypting them. This had not quelled the strong allegations which saw him involved in the killings. Such a doubt persisted. That was what my heritage amounted to, what is pompously called the duty to remember.

I spoke about how Aurélie had also tried to find out, how she had dug up the past, met witnesses, found a former serviceman from the Abwehr. […] He comforted Aurélie in her bias and confirmed all she wanted to hear: her father had been a good man. Thence, the former Abwehr man had been deemed a witness worthy of trust. A life built on such oblivious denial! One had to refute this sort of irenicism. No one could doubt the fate reserved to Jews, nobody could ignore that armies had lent a hand in their persecution. So, what was the task at hand? Being History’s accountant was the task. Level with it all, and see.

© Philippe Matsas

Jean Sorrente, born in Luxembourg in 1954, is a novelist, poet and essayist who questions the relationship between reality and fiction and probes narrative structures. For his fiction, he has been awarded the Prix Tony-Bourg, the Prix de la Libre Académie de Belgique as well as the Prix Servais.

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Francis Kirps The Mutations The Mutations: seven stories and a poem, each with a classic text as a template and starting point, from Little Red Riding Hood to Virginia Woolf.

The housefly Leon Sumsa wakes up one morning and finds itself transformed into a ‘monstrous vertebrate’, that is, a human being.

The lion from Kurt Tucholsky’s satire ‘Der Löw ist los!’ (The Lion Is Loose!) mutates into a polar bear exploring hip Berlin. The model of the Venus statue from Prosper Mérimée’s tale ‘La Vénus d’Ille’ (The Venus of Ille) works as a young slave in a ‘venture’ that shows amazing parallels to today’s working world. Heinrich von Kleist’s ‘Die Anekdote aus dem letzten preußischen Kriege’ (The Anecdote from the Last Prussian War) is moved to the future, where the last four people are at war with each other. Ingeborg Bachmann’s ‘Anrufung des großen Bären’ (Invocation of the Great Bear) is crossed with Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos and the result is a poem that strangely sounds like Gottfried Benn.

Prix Servais 2020, European Union Prize for Literature 2020 Original title: Die Mutationen Language: German Genre: short stories Year: 2019 220 pp., 110 × 187 mm, 20 € ISBN: 978-2-9199541-3-1 Rights available: worldwide Foreign sales: Albania (Dituria) Greece (Vakxikon) Hungary (Colibri) Macedonia (Antolog) Serbia (Treći Trg)

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I

T was Open House at the Berlin Zoo and that day of all days –

maybe it was the fault of the celebratory joint which Zookeeper Pfleiderer had shared with Herr Özgüntürk from the Predator House and Frau Süskind from administration – the zookeeper forgot to lock the door of the polar bear’s cage after him. Which, in turn, Roald Björnsson, the longest-serving polar bear, took as an invitation to mingle with the people outside. Maybe it was even expected of him. And all those colourful balloons! Björnsson stepped outside. No sign of Pfleiderer. Instead, the visitors immediately broke into a mighty uproar. The crowd shouted and ran around everywhere. Children squealed, women screamed, men wept – it was as if the Beatles had just got off the plane.

Translated from the German by Gerard Chapple

© Philippe Matsas

Francis Kirps lives and works in Esch/ Alzette. He first started publishing in the nineties before joining the German poetry slam circuit and editing the satirical magazine EXOT. Since then, he has published two short story collections and a novel and numerous texts in anthologies. He is also a regular contributor to the satire page of die tageszeitung.

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Jeff Schinker Sabotage In these four tales about broken hearts and bodies, sixteen narrators question the inept madness of the world of work.

A company decides to organise a fiendish, Darwinian version of a team building game. At the job centre, the identities of the unemployed, fraudsters, artists and employees dissolve into a nebula where reality and fiction are intertwined. A book prize is creating chaos and hopes in the Luxembourgish literary scene, which is being closely examined by a reality show. A literary centre on the Wannsee is taken over by an unscrupulous banker for his birthday party, in the course of which two worldviews collide. In these four tales around broken hearts and bodies, sixteen narrators question the inept madness of the world of work, while sometimes questioning language itself. They sabotage their lives or the lives of others and go through episodes in which everyone discovers an impostor.

Original title: Sabotage Language: English, French, German, Luxembourgish Genre: short stories / novel Year: 2018 272 pp., 110 × 187 mm, 22 € ISBN: 978-2-9199541-2-4 Rights available: worldwide Foreign sales: Hungary (Colibri)

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A

BUNCH of office workers glides into the room – the working class

mutated into citizens, a few rungs higher on the salary ladder, but just as bitter, humiliated, desireless, oppressed, easy to manipulate. I don’t bother to internalize their features even minimally.

Yes, that’s bad taste. Excuse me. But I like it, bad taste. Life, in general, is pretty distasteful, isn’t it?

And he’d inevitably be blocked by this same dissatisfaction with all kinds of words, by his disgust in their tendency to the universal, one word for thousands of varieties and nuances of emotions, one expression to feed humanity. Words were dancing gigolos who’d adapt to every possible situation. He was done with them.

By the entrance, the musicians where still arguing, frantically at times. Around them, not much could be recognized, the lighting was so minimal, as if one were in a fiction in which the author couldn’t be bothered with lengthy descriptions.

© Baudouin Schinker

Jeff Schinker, born in 1985, is a writer and the head of the cultural pages of the daily newspaper Tageblatt. He also organises a series of readings with formal constraints.

His debut novella Retrouvailles was published by Hydre Éditions in 2015. His next book, Sabotage – a work in four languages – was nominated for the Prix Servais, the Lëtzebuerger Buchpräis and the European Union Prize for Literature.

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Original title: Les Bulles Language: French Genre: short stories Year: 2018 100 pp., 110 × 187 mm, 12 € ISBN: 978-2-9199541-1-7 Rights available: worldwide Rights sold: Greece (World Books)

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I

T was as if I were discovering the world for the first time, I mean

the immensity of the world, the majesty of the world transformed by man, his abundance and power. There were the sea and sky, equally vast, equally blue, suspended bridges, a forest of skyscrapers the names of which I didn’t know at the time and which reflected the golden light of a cloudless azure. What crowds were walking along the boulevards of this city of giants?

© Raya Meerzoumen

Tom Reisen was born in Luxembourg in 1971. His father is a Luxembourger and his mother is of Serbian descent. He has published two collections of poetry and several short stories. Author of a PhD thesis on André Gide, he was a university researcher (University of Sheffield), then a journalist (Tageblatt) before joining Foreign Affairs. As a diplomat, he served at the UN headquarters in New York and at UNESCO in Paris, among other places. The Bubbles is his first prose work.

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Elise Schmit Falling from Various Heights For the protagonists in Falling from Various Heights, everything revolves around the question of how life will continue following decisive upheavals.

Watching from the kitchen window how tourists plunge to their deaths, driving aimlessly through all of Germany out of lovesickness until the money runs out, repairing a radio because devices are easier to mend than a broken existence: the characters in Elise Schmit’s short story collection Falling from Various Heights have had to come to terms with life after the great personal catastrophe. Whether they fall from rocks or in love – in the end everything resolves around the question of how live will continue after the decisive upheavals.

Prix Servais 2019

Original title: Stürze aus unterschiedlichen Fallhöhen Language: German Genre: short stories Year: 2018 114 pp., 110 × 187 mm, 15 € ISBN: 978-2-9199541-0-0 Rights available: worldwide Rights sold: Greece (World Books)

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I

F ‘we’ had met two years ago, he said, ‘we’ would not have had

such a pleasant conversation. I certainly wouldn’t have talked to him. What was the idea of accusing me of prejudices that I had long since discarded, I thought. No work, no friends, no Marcia.

Waves, salt water, ever deeper to where no more light penetrates, seabed, a few layers of sand and dirt, then, eventually, me. That is how far I had sunk. It took me months to understand that I could not hide in a house that would soon no longer be mine.

© Boris Loder

Elise Schmit (1born 1982) writes stories, plays, and poems. She lives in Luxembourg.

She was awarded the Prix Servais in 2019 for her short story collection Stürze aus unterschiedlichen Fallhöhen.

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excerpt

Nora Wagener Larvae Sixteen short stories different in style, form and content, yet all of them feature characters who find themselves in different stages of metamorphosis.

Jealous sisters, abandoned children, washed-up couples and a dead goldfish. Nora Wagener’s characters are in an in-between state, in the process of becoming. The title of her collection, Larvae, already hints at this. Her characters all live in a world at the centre of which lies flawed interpersonal communication and its perfidies.

Prix Servais 2017

Original title: Larven Language: German Genre: short stories Year: 2016 160 pp., 110 × 187 mm, 15 € ISBN: 978-99959-938-3-2 Rights available: worldwide Foreign sales: Serbia (Karpos Books)

32

I

T was the right shoe. It pinched. I have to start earlier. With Leonie.

It was her shoe. One day, Leonie walked through the snow. I think it was winter. Or it might have been rain and autumn. In any case, particles were falling from the sky, falling on her hair and glittering under the light of the lamp where I stood when she passed me. I could see how affliction was approaching her, because she kept running towards it with her hiking boots on. In the meanwhile I stood underneath light bulbs changing caps, because snow and rain were getting through and chilling the bald spots on my head. Thus, weeks and weather fronts passed us by –with no relief.

© Philippe Matsas

Nora Wagener, born in 1989, studied Creative Writing and Journalism at the University of Hildesheim. She published her first novel, Menschenliebe und Vogel, schrei, in 2011, and a collection of three stories, E. Galaxien, in 2015. In 2012, she received the Manfred-Maurer-Literaturpreis as well the Hans-Bernhard-Schiff special prize and won the Concours littéraire national for a short story later published in the collection Larvae.

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© 2024 Hydre Éditions With thanks to Kultur | lx Arts Council Luxembourg European Union Prize for Literature / Creative Europe for translations and translation funding.