New release - Immortality for an elite - Softcover

Paperback

English ISBN: 978-3-384-59549-2

Circles and horizons
Immortality for an elite

Short stories

In this volume I have compiled 48 short stories, tales and other short prose pieces. They date back to the beginning of the 90s of the last millennium. I welcome the 3rd millennium with a sarcastic column.

I am firmly convinced that the world does not end at the horizon. That's why I like to address my own quirks and weaknesses, which I impose on my protagonists, and then I also like to make fun of them. After all, you're no longer the guy from back then who did such strange things.

However, not all the human oddities I write about come from my own life, but from careful observations of what is happening around me. In some stories, I exaggerate human idiosyncrasies and weaknesses to the point of grotesqueness. I particularly love human idiosyncrasies because that's what humanity is all about. Let's take this story:

"The pedantic passenger." This story describes in meticulous detail the observation of a corpulent passenger who devotes himself with meticulous precision to the ritual of eating during a flight.

Sometimes there are also stories that are, on the face of it, silly, but on closer inspection are not so silly after all.

Let's look at: "From the life of a chewing gum."

A completely trivial matter is played up and dramatised here. You could say there is an importance to the trivial. That is also human.

I also like to deal with psychological or philosophical aspects in my stories, such as in "The Firebird", in which the suitability of Homo Sapiens as the crown of humanity is critically scrutinised. I don't shy away from psychologically disturbing stories either. Anyone who reads "The Child's Grave", for example, will agree. It always becomes disturbing when human coldness or callousness comes into play.

I also give scientists tremendous possibilities and describe the excessive demands placed on people when dealing with them, e.g. in the story "Immortality for an elite" or in "End of a chromosome".

It is impossible to present the range of stories in just a few words.

In Motivations, backgrounds and explanations, an extensive appendix, I provide insight into the creation of these stories. Here the reader will also find references to the time of origin of the contributions. I have endeavoured to assess my own texts as if I were analysing other people's texts. Of course, this is not so easy, especially when a text is based on a true experience. However, the text is usually not the experience itself, but an invented story in which I use the characters and the context of the experience and often exaggerate them in a pointed way. I do not describe any actual living persons.

This appendix should enable the reader to understand the meaning of the more difficult or seemingly trivial contributions.

I invite you to scrutinise me and my stories.