Feridun Zaimoglu made a spectacular entrance onto the German cultural scene in 1995 with Kanak Sprak: a volume of incendiary texts based on interviews with disaffected Turkish German youths, using an invented, stylized literary language, a hybrid of multiple varieties of German with a hip hop beat. A prolific and acclaimed novelist, dramatist, newspaper columnist, visual artist and live performer, Zaimoglu has remained in the public eye through controversy and reinvention. His more recent work appropriates German literary traditions in radically new ways, adapting Romantic styles, narrative forms and motifs to postmodern conditions. This volume features the suppressed original first chapter of Leyla, Zaimoglu's critically and commercially most successful novel, first published in 2006, as well as an extensive interview with the author. Critical essays on his writing by major scholars in the field cover issues of gender, language and power, the politics of ethnicity, religion, Romanticism and anti-modernism, and the challenges of translating his work. This is the first volume of criticism in any language dedicated to Zaimoglu's literary work.

Soleiman Adel Guemar was born and raised in Algiers where he worked as a journalist. He published numerous stories and won two national poetry prizes. In 2002 he left Algeria to seek safety for himself and his family in the UK. 'Sate of Emergency', a representative selection of Guemar's poetry,is rooted in Algerian experience, speaking of urgent concerns everywhere - oppression, resistance, state violence, traumas and private dreams. His poetry sings of life's sensual pleasures in the face of the grotesque morbidity of violent political repression. In the excellent translation by Tom Cheesman and John Goodby, Guemar's poems carry all their native force and brusque wit. In her introduction, Lisa Appignanesi writes: "Soleiman Adel Guemar is almost exactly as old as the independent Republic of Algeria. He has witnessed its terrible history, the crimes against humanity which attended its birth and the enduring 'state of emergency' under which life has been blighted ever since. This volume marks an important moment: a record from the inside of a history which is too palpably of our times...Where before we had only newspaper headlines, we now have a living voice, both political and lyrical - an intensely individual voice which speaks out freely and traces the lineaments of a tragic history. "

"German Text Crimes "offers new perspectives on scandals and legal actions implicating writers of German literature since the 1950s. Topics range from literary echoes of the "Heidegger Affair" to recent incitements to murder businessmen (agents of American neo-liberal power) in works by Rolf Hochhuth and others. GDR songwriters' cat-and-mouse games with the Stasi; feminist debates on pornography, around works by Charlotte Roche and Elfriede Jelinek; controversies over anti-Semitism, around Bernhard Schlink's "Der Vorleser / The Reader "and Martin Walser's lampooning of the Jewish critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki; Peter Handke's pro-Serbian travelogue; the disputed editing of Ingeborg Bachmann's "Nachlass"; vexed relations between dramatists and directors; (ab)uses of privacy law to 'censor' contemporary fiction: these are among the cases of 'text crimes' discussed. Not all involve codified law, but all test relations between state power, civil society, media industries and artistic license

Zafer Senocak is the most prominent and versatile German Turkish writer today. A prize-winning poet, translator, editor, political and philosophical essayist, and fiction writer, Senocak is the most challenging voice of the Turkish population in united Germany. His stylish and provocative essays explore taboo and repressed aspects of relations between Occident and Orient, Europe and Islam. His fiction has won him international acclaim, especially the post-unification novel "Gefahrliche Verwandtschaft "(1998), which deals with the German-Jewish-Turkish-Armenian complex. But poetry is always at the heart of his work.
This is the first book in any language devoted to Zafer Senocak. It is intended both as an introduction for the general reader and as a resource for the specialist. The volume includes a brief biography, previously unpublished poetry, and an interview with the author held during his period as writer-in-residence at University of Wales Swansea in May 2000. A series of critical contributions by researchers in Britain, France, Germany and the United States address a range of issues, from sexuality to multiculturalism, covering all genres of his work. The volume concludes with the most comprehensive international bibliography to date.