Background
Botho Strauss was born on December 2, 1944 in Naumburg, Sachsen-Anhalt, Germany. He is the son of a consultant in the grocery business.
(Richard Schroubeck, a Berlin bookseller in his early thir...)
Richard Schroubeck, a Berlin bookseller in his early thirties, has entered a devastating time in his life. His girlfriend, Hannah, has left him, and Richard does not know why. Introspective, egotistic, and terribly dependent, Richard is sure Hannah will return, if only because he cannot live without her. He withdraws to his apartment, pouring out his guilt and hopes into writing. For weeks he quits bathing and shaving, and takes a perverse delight in his heroic despair. Though he is certain that absolution will come when Hannah returns, he comes, in time, to realize that the constant writing has become his true devotion. Richard Schroubeck, a Berlin bookseller in his early thirties, has entered a devastating time in his life. His girlfriend, Hannah, has left him, and Richard does not know why. Introspective, egotistic, and terribly dependent, Richard is sure Hannah will return, if only because he cannot live without her. He withdraws to his apartment, pouring out his guilt and hopes into writing. For weeks he quits bathing and shaving, and takes a perverse delight in his heroic despair. Though he is certain that absolution will come when Hannah returns, he comes, in time, to realize that the constant writing has become his true devotion.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0810113422/?tag=2022091-20
1995
(Gerhard Richter is justly famed for the photorealism of h...)
Gerhard Richter is justly famed for the photorealism of his early canvases, but it is less well known that he has also painted directly onto photographic prints. These (mostly small-format) pieces were reproduced in books as early as the first Atlas, but practically all of the works themselves are housed in private collections and rarely exhibited in public. Overpainted Photographs gathers this body of work, which unites the labor of the hand with the work of mechanical reproduction to produce a kind of art as conceptually rich as Richter's better-known paintings, neutralizing the expressive powers of each medium to reach an indifference to their potency. In an overture to Duchamp's "degree zero" found objects, the original photographs are frequently bland in content--an empty office, a ball, a beach scene or tourist snapshot--and Richter's painterly gestures bounce off that content in peculiar ways, sometimes interacting with it, sometimes overlaying it and sometimes threatening to eclipse it altogether. The final effect is to cause both photography and painting to seem like incredibly bizarre activities, disparate in texture but often complicit in aspiration. This monograph offers a unique opportunity to savor what had previously been a neglected but copious aspect of Richter's work.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/3775722432/?tag=2022091-20
2009
(The six linked sections of Couples, Passersby present vig...)
The six linked sections of Couples, Passersby present vignettes of frustrated connections and emotional numbness as characters search for meaning in art, in language, and in each other. A man waiting for his beloved to cross the street watches as she's struck by a car. A colorless suburban couple makes the long journey from their home to sit in a gay bar and feel exotic. A man leaves an animated intellectual lunch and goes unrecognized by his companion a few minutes later. Throughout, Strauss filters the particulars of everyday existence through his singular sensibility to creating a portrait of contemporary urban society and the artist's place within it. The six linked sections of Couples, Passersby present vignettes of frustrated connections and emotional numbness as characters search for meaning in art, in language, and in each other. A man waiting for his beloved to cross the street watches as she's struck by a car. A colorless suburban couple makes the long journey from their home to sit in a gay bar and feel exotic. A man leaves an animated intellectual lunch and goes unrecognized by his companion a few minutes later. Throughout, Strauss filters the particulars of everyday existence through his singular sensibility to creating a portrait of contemporary urban society and the artist's place within it.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0810112426/?tag=2022091-20
(These three plays, first published in German in the 1980s...)
These three plays, first published in German in the 1980s, show Botho Strauss developing an enigmatic, unsettling, and uniquely theatrical style. Set in Hamburg, The Park is Strauss’ take on A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Seven Doors brings together a jilted husband, a wedding without guests, and two monks with an intimate knowledge of hell. In Time and the Room, the room contrives to be the play’s main character. These three plays, first published in German in the 1980s, show Botho Strauss developing an enigmatic, unsettling, and uniquely theatrical style. Set in Hamburg, The Park is Strauss’ take on A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Seven Doors brings together a jilted husband, a wedding without guests, and two monks with an intimate knowledge of hell. In Time and the Room, the room contrives to be the play’s main character.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1840024763/?tag=2022091-20
(Populated by characters who are searching for meaning in ...)
Populated by characters who are searching for meaning in life and in one another--a hiker waiting for a train in a deserted station, a television journalist who meets an old lover he doesn't really recognize, mismatched lovers, couples married and casual, lost and lonely people--Botho Strauss's Living Glimmering Lying is a melancholy collection of sketches and vignettes, a series of tableaux of post-reunification Berlin. Populated by characters who are searching for meaning in life and in one another--a hiker waiting for a train in a deserted station, a television journalist who meets an old lover he doesn't really recognize, mismatched lovers, couples married and casual, lost and lonely people--Botho Strauss's Living Glimmering Lying is a melancholy collection of sketches and vignettes, a series of tableaux of post-reunification Berlin.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0810112833/?tag=2022091-20
Botho Strauss was born on December 2, 1944 in Naumburg, Sachsen-Anhalt, Germany. He is the son of a consultant in the grocery business.
Strauss attended University of Cologne and University of Munich.
Strauss was a critic and editorial journalist for the journal Theater heute (Theater Today) from 1967 to 1970. Between 1970 and 1975, he served as a dramaturgical assistant to Peter Stein at the West Berlin Schaubühne am Halleschen Ufer. After his first attempt as a writer, a Gorky adaptation for the screen, he decided to live and work as a writer.
Focusing on themes of loneliness, the inefficacy of language to communicate, and the passivity that according to Strauss and other artists of the absurdist school are hallmarks of the post-World War II era, Strauss often writes tales whose realism is bracketed by their relationship to a larger story within which they reside. While some critics find his depressing tales of lonely anomie affected rather than affecting, others remark upon Strauss’s fine-tuned sense of language and admire his ability to distill the problems of contemporary life within the confines of the printed or spoken word.
The Strauss’s typical subject matter—the inability of human beings to meaningfully connect in the modern world, or as Lore Dickstein put it in a review of Devotion in the Saturday Review, “the isolation of the self/artist in a world where no one really listens”—is given the grotesquely comical or irrational treatment common in absurdist literature. Though Strauss has also at times evoked the pathos of his characters with a poignancy some critics laud, his generic themes and treatment of them at times draw weary commentary from critics in the United States in particular. Strauss is frequently commended for the precision and subtlety of his language, however, particularly in his dramas, and in Germany and Europe has garnered the highest literary prizes for his fearless depiction of the post-modern human condition.
Strauss’s most famous play, Gross und klein: Szenen (Big and Little: Scenes), follows a woman from her separation from her husband through her initial attempts to connect with others to her eventual disintegration into a homeless person sitting in a doctor’s office.
(Populated by characters who are searching for meaning in ...)
(The six linked sections of Couples, Passersby present vig...)
(Gerhard Richter is justly famed for the photorealism of h...)
2009(These three plays, first published in German in the 1980s...)
(Richard Schroubeck, a Berlin bookseller in his early thir...)
1995(A play about a woman's attempt at communication with a wo...)
1979