More school drama, disliking a writer for the wrong reason and Pegasus Pulp e-books conquer Italy and Spain

Another major drama erupted in my afternoon class today, ultimately spawned – as far as I could tell – by one girl telling another that she looked like a slut. This is really the most drama laden group I ever had.

If you’re a reader living in Italy, Spain, Andorra, San Marino or the Vatican State and would like to try some of my e-books, it just got a lot cheaper and easier to do so, because Amazon has opened Kindle stores in Italy and Spain and abolished the two US-dollar surcharge for customers from those countries.

I have a more extensive post at the Pegasus Pulp blog. In the meantime, here is the full listing of all available Pegasus Pulp e-books at Amazon Spain and Amazon Italy. I have also added the purchase links for Amazon Italy and Spain to the individual book pages.

In other news, German writer Christa Wolf died yesterday aged 82. I have always had an odd relationship to Christa Wolf and her work. I disliked her for the longest time, because of a novel I was made to read in 12th grade, in which the female first person narrator stated that “men hitting women is normal and doesn’t mean anything. It’s like hitting dogs and children.” That line – which is all I remember about the novel question – infuriated my budding feminist self. Since then Christa Wolf was always “that woman who thinks hitting women, children and dogs is okay” or just “the bloody East German abuse enabler” for short.

There is only one problem: Christa Wolf never wrote the novel in question. Fellow East German author Christoph Hein did. I sold the book in question the summer after I finished school – with great glee, alongside all of those other assigned novels I hated – and subsequently must have gotten the authors mixed up. Or rather, I simply thought, “That awful book was written by an East German author whose name begins with ‘Christ'” and Christa Wolf was always more famous than Christoph Hein.

So I disliked poor Ms. Wolf for a book she never wrote and only realized my mistake approximately two years ago when Christoph Hein was introduced on a TV program as the author of that book I hated. It’s this book, by the way – though I always knew it by the West German title Drachenblut, which probably contributed to my disappointment, because I had hoped for a fantasy novel and got some abuse-enabling stuff about an emotionally disturbed East German woman instead.

Of course, I immediately mentally apologized to Ms. Wolf and transferred my dislike to Mr Hein, who – based on both Drachenblut and the new novel he was being interviewed about – really does seem to have issues with women. So did the German teacher who assigned the book, by the way, because he had the tendency to assign books with very problematic gender relationships (Emilia Galotti a.k.a. “Let’s justify honour killings” anyone?) and then acted utterly astonished when enraged female students started arguing back at him.

You know what the worst thing about the whole Christa Wolf/Christoph Hein mix-up is. Not only did I spend years disliking an innocent writer for a book she never wrote, it also turns out that there was not a single book written by a female author among all of the books assigned in my German classes throughout school. And how depressing is that?