BiblioVault - Books by Jones, Lucy

The Hour Between Dog and Wolf

Silke Scheuermann

Seagull Books, 2018

Now in paperback, Silke Scheuermann's portrayal of intimacy and estrangement between sisters as they navigate rivalries, addiction, and shared love interests.

A young woman who has been living abroad returns to her hometown of Frankfurt am Main in Germany. Her sister Ines—a beautiful, impetuous painter—who still lives there, soon appears and promptly asks for financial help. But the returning sister knew this was coming—it is how their relationship has always worked. And this time, she’s determined that that will change.

But our plans don’t always hold up to the surprises presented by life—and when the sister finds herself about to drift into an affair with Ines’s lover, the two women grow unexpectedly closer. The Hour Between Dog and Wolf is a tale of disorientation in a modern, fundamentally rootless society that has become increasingly erratic and self-absorbed—it is a powerful exploration of the difficulties of intimacy and addiction.

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I Have No Regrets

Diaries, 1955-1963

Brigitte Reimann

Seagull Books, 2019

Frank and refreshing, Brigitte Reimann’s collected diaries provide a candid account of life in socialist Germany.

With an upbeat tempo and amusing tone, I Have No Regrets contains detailed accounts of the author’s love affairs, daily life, writing, and reflections. Like the heroines in her stories, Reimann was impetuous and outspoken, addressing issues and sensibilities otherwise repressed in the era of the German Democratic Republic. She followed the state’s call for artists to leave their ivory towers and engage with the people, moving to the new town of Hoyerswerda to work part-time at a nearby industrial plant and run writing classes for the workers. Her diaries and letters provide a fascinating parallel to her fictional writing. By turns shocking, passionate, unflinching, and bitter—but above all life-affirming—they offer an unparalleled insight into what life was like during the first decades of the GDR.

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Lyric Novella

Annemarie Schwarzenbach

Seagull Books, 2011

Schwarzenbach’s clear, psychologically acute prose makes this novella an evocative narrative, with many intriguing parallels to her own life.

Annemarie Schwarzenbach—journalist, novelist, antifascist, archaeologist, and traveler—has become a European cult figure for bohemian free spirits since the rediscovery of her works in the late 1980s. Lyric Novella is her story of a young man’s obsession with a Berlin variété actress. Despite having his future career mapped out for him in the diplomatic service, the young man begins to question all his family values under Sibylle’s spell. His family, future, and social standing become irrelevant when set against his overriding compulsion to pick her up every night from the theater so they can go for a drive. Bringing the story back to her own life, Schwarzenbach admitted after publication that her hero was in fact a young woman, not a man, leaving little doubt that Lyric Novella is a literary tale of lesbian love during socially and politically turbulent times.

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