They hunt you down. And then they kill you.
DAS SPIEL
(A Game of Life and Death)
by Jan Beck
Penguin Germany, July 2020
(chez Verlagsgruppe Random House – voir catalogue)
When someone asks Mavie about her cool glow-in-the-dark tattoo at a party, she thinks they’re joking. But then she sees it herself, in the light on the dancefloor – and panics. How did the scorpion get on her skin? Mavie has no idea that the sign makes her the target of a sinister game. Meanwhile, detectives Inga Björk and Christian Brand are investigating the case of a jogger found brutally murdered in a forest. They don’t know that this is just the beginning of a sadistic series of murders – and that the only way they can stop it is by changing sides and joining in the deadly game …
Jan Beck, born in 1975, is the pen name of a successful German-language author and former lawyer. With his action-packed debut thriller DAS SPIEL, Beck takes the reader all the way into the darkest reaches of the human soul.
How do you begin a future that has essentially already ended, separated from your home, your language and yourself by a stretch of water? Kurt Schwitters is forty-nine years old when the Nazis force him to flee Germany. His success, work, possessions, parents, and wife Helma stay behind – and art gives way to the art of survival. Schwitters’s second life in a foreign language begins in Norway, then takes him to London and finally to the Lake District. Wantee, the new woman at his side, keeps him on course and his head above water, even when the word artist falls silent. With his Merzbau installation, Schwitters has discovered a new way to capture sky and serenity, shimmering meadows and transparent air. He is ludicrously disciplined, to the point of exhaustion. As we watch him at work, we learn that art doesn’t interpret the world: It translates it into forms that move us. In SCHWITTERS, Ulrike Draesner follows the writer and artist Kurt Schwitters into exile, giving voice to Kurt, his wife, his son and his lover. Through a virtuoso blend of fact and fiction, she has created a panorama of a time when the struggle for freedom and art was renewed in the face of a world on fire.
How we present ourselves and how we are perceived by others are in effect part of our personality. The image we project and the roles we play are crucial to our success in both professional and private contexts. Tijen Onaran, a renowned speaker and networker, masterfully explains how to create a personal brand, find our own agenda, and shape how we are perceived online in social media and offline as well. In doing so, she recounts her own experiences in politics and the digital world, including her setbacks, learning effects, and her own personal branding.
The clitoris is the final taboo in the world of gender equality. For centuries, science thought women were inside-out men, and anxiety about female sexuality framed attitudes and perpetuated inaccurate information. The reality of women’s sexuality was ignored, repressed, or defamed. THE SWEETNESS OF VENUS takes a rigorous romp through science, religion, philosophy, and psychology, to unravel the history of the clitoris, and then uses this context to explore the language, literature, and art around it. Much of the clitoris’s story has been defined by those who discovered and mapped her. However, even after the true anatomy of the clitoris was finally fully mapped with 3D imaging in 2005, it still hardly gets a mention in America’s bestselling teen sex education book for girls, and no mention at all in the parallel book for boys. Equality when it comes to sex has not been achieved, yet.
Les droits audiovisuels du livre THE SHADOWS ont récemment été acquis par Fruit Tree, la société de production de l’actrice Emma Stone et de son fiancé, le scénariste et réalisateur Dave McCary, en partenariat avec A24 Films. Emma Stone incarnera également le rôle principal dans le film. La date de sortie n’est pas encore annoncée. (Lire l’