UITGELEZEN

With 'The Gift', Gaea Schoeters wrote a political parable that is hard to ignore. The story takes place in Berlin, where suddenly thousands of elephants appear. A gift from the president of Botswana, as it turns out. Schoeters presents the dilemma of the democratic politician and addresses issues such as environmental problems, the refugee crisis, and the Western approach to Africa. Funny and uncomfortable.

"Playful, inventive, and challenging. The Gift is a well-cooked political satire à la The Capital by Robert Menasse, but even better." Tom Lanoye

"Gaea Schoeters’ political parable ‘The Gift’ is a gift." ★★★★★ De Standaard

With the novella Mario and the Magician (1930), the German writer Thomas Mann (1875-1955) expressed a pressing sense of unease after a vacation in Italy. A premonition of how the world would fall into a second devastating war a few years later due to the encroaching fascism. Koenraad Tinel (1934) was struck, 150 years after Mann's birth, by the contemporary echoes of his story and, in close collaboration with translator Els Snick, extracts a thrillingly imagined warning.

"Mann would have been astonished. Tinel's drawings probe the essence of what it means to be human, captured in ominous shades of gray, soot smudges, and paint splatters. Boundless yet precise, as if it could not have been done any other way." - De Tijd

"Some pages resemble a palimpsest, with sketches passed down through the centuries, from cave to graphic novel. Tinel lets doom solidify into modern fossils." De Standaard

A woman looks at her toaster and suddenly the whole world bursts open in her kitchen, in all its brutality and beauty. 'Spent Light' is a masterful blend of fiction, history, memoir and love letter. Former war correspondent Lara Pawson elevates the networks of junk we have accumulated around us into brilliant, relentless and extremely funny prose. You will never look at a washing machine, a squirrel or an egg timer in the same way again.