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The Snowman
Alexander Verlag Berlin
ISBN:
0.00 €
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This page was created as a tool for literary agents and foreign publishers interested in working with Alexander Verlag.
The translation rights for The Snowman are still available for all languages except for English, French, Italian and Spanish.
The German paperback rights were sold to Diogenes Verlag in Zurich. They will publish all nine volumes of the Fauser-Edition in 2009 in their mass paperback series.
About the author
Jörg Fauser (1944–1987) was a German writer, poet and journalist. Child of antifascist artists in the late 1967 he went to live in the notorious junkies colony in Tophane, Istanbul. A year later he returned to Germany and became involved with the student movement living in an occupied house in Frankfurt and then in a Berlin commune. Having broken his dependency on heroin at the age of thirty he spent much of the rest of his working life dependent on alcohol. Fauser died on the night of his 43rd birthday, run over by a track on a German highway.
Jörg Fauser is one of the most significant writers of the 1968-generation. He adored and was very much influenced by Anglo-American Literature (Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammet, William S. Burroughs, Charles Bukowski, Alain Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Eric Ambler, Graham Greene). He is seen by many contemporary German writers (Jakob Arjouni, Feridun Zaimoglu, Helmut Krausser, Maxim Biller) as an unsurpassable model.
Fauser introduced a new American "touch" in German prose, lyric and essay, in order to offer an alternative to what he saw as the well-meaning, overly optimistic literature predominating in West Germany. In the 80s he made a breakthrough with novels and crime stories, but he also did editorial work for several magazines, wrote columns, radio plays, songs and reports about crime and politics, refusing any kind of separation between "high" and "low" literature. His writings are populated by dealers, crooks, alcoholics, junkies, whores (remaining true to his claim: »When literature does not stay with the downtrodden, it may as well be considered as rent a party service«), described with incorruptible glance, but his texts are also exact and scrutinizing documents of West German reality.
Der Schneemann (1980) - The Snowman
Siegfried Blum is struggling to sell his stock of Danish pornography. 'I don't see it as any more immoral than selling Coca-Cola,' he says. Then a left-luggage ticket leads him to five pounds of uncut Peruvian cocaine, with a value he estimates at $600 000. He expects that his worries will soon be relieved. Until he tries to sell it. So begins a restless narrative populated by junkies and small-time dealers. Blum travels from Malta to Germany to Belgium, surrounded by unflinching images of sex and drug use, seen through the paranoid eyes of a drug dealer. This is a fast-paced thriller written with acerbic humour, a hardboiled evocation of drug-fuelled existence and a penetrating observation of those at the edge of German society.
The Snowman has been sold in Germany since 1981 more than 250.000 times and was turned into a movie in 1984 (starring Marius Mueller Westernhagen).
PRESS
»Prose that penetrates the reader's mind like speed, fast paced, without an ounce of fat.« Weltwoche
»The best German thriller ever.« tageszeitung
»Jörg Fauser was the Kafka of crime writing.« The Independent
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