Away for a few days – and a video from the Leipzig Book Fair

Today was the last day of school. Luckily, it wasn’t too exhausting – though many of my 9th-graders still didn’t practice the vocabulary they’ve been supposed to practice for two weeks now.

From tomorrow on I’ll be in Yorkshire for a few days until next Tuesday. I’ll have internet connection, but there won’t be any regular posts here. However, I’ve got an interview planned to tide you over while I’m gone.

Finally, I leave you with a neat video: Cultural critic/journalist Dieter Moor visits the Leipzig Book Fair and doesn’t just talk with literary heavyweights like Martin Walser and Rafik Schami, lesser literary weights such as TV host turned chick lit author Sarah Kuttner as well as fellow critics Denis Scheck and Hellmuth Karasek but also descends into the bowels of popular literature and visits the booth of an erotica publisher as well as that of the Martin Kelter Verlag, one of the two big German publishers of the dime novelettes known as “Romanhefte”. The scenes of Dieter Moor reading out excerpts from Der Wilde Kaiser – Graf Hubertus liebt seine Heimat (The Wild Emperor, i.e. the name of a mountain in the Alps – Count Hubertus loves his homeland), one of Kelter Verlag’s “Heimatroman” offerings, are hilarious. I particularly like Hellmuth Karasek’s, one of Germany’s best known literary critics, stating that yes, of course he read “Romanhefte” as a kid. Everybody did.