Alice
Description
Alice, the German writer Judith Hermann's 2009 short-story collection, was short-listed for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.
When someone very close to you dies, your whole life changes. Everything is different. Alice is the central figure in these five interconnected narratives, which tell of her life at times of loss. Suddenly it is no longer possible to say what the person looked like, how he spoke, cursed, smiled, how he lived his life. Objects are left behind, books, letters, pictures, and every now and again you think you can see them in a crowd. Judith Hermann tells of days of transition, of waiting, of holding on and letting go and of how clear and dazzling such days can sometimes be. Alice is a book of extraordinary power and great literary beauty from one of Europe's finest writers.
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Persons
Judith Hermann was born in Berlin in 1970. She is the author of several novels and story collections, including Alice, which was short-listed for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize; Where Love Begins; and Summerhouse, Later, which won the Kleist Prize. Her novel Daheim (Home) was a Spiegel bestseller, won the Rheingau and the Bremen Literature Prizes, and was nominated for the Leipzig Book Fair Prize. Her work has been translated into thirty-five languages, and a number of her short stories have been adapted for film. She lives and works in Berlin.
Margot Bettauer Dembo (1928-2019) was the translator of works by Judith Hermann, Robert Gernhardt, Joachim Fest, Ödön von Horváth, and Feridun Zaimoglu, among others. She was awarded the Goethe-Institut/Berlin Translator's Prize in 1994 and the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize in 2003. Dembo also worked as a translator for two feature documentary films: The Restless Conscience, which was nominated for an Academy Award, and The Burning Wall.
