Five Minutes Before the World Was Made

“Despite – or perhaps because of – its inconsistencies, this anachronistic book is extremely enjoyable and even thrilling to read. It consists solely of arabesques with which the first-person narrator enchants, entwines, and draws the readers down to the level of his indecisiveness, which underlies the text as a poetic aura.”

– Hans Christoph Buch, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

Wolf Christian Schröder was born in Bremen. He spent his childhood and youth in Kiel and Tübingen, later England. He then pursued a degree in Slavic Languages and Literature at the Free University of Berlin. He translated dramas from Russian and English and wrote his own stage plays, receiving a commission from the Hamburg Schauspielhaus. Additional plays premiered in Hamburg, Hanover, Münster, Aachen, and Constance. He wrote the libretto for the musical “Die Liebe” at Ballhaus Ost, Berlin. His novel “Die Weissweintrinker” was published in 2020, followed by his novel “Tapirgebein” in 2024. He received the Alfred Döblin Scholarship and a working scholarship from Künstlerhaus Villa Waldberta, Starnberger See.

Dennis McCort was born and raised in Hoboken, New Jersey. He writes of his experiences growing up there in the postwar industrial era before gentrification in his memoir, A Kafkaesque Memoir: Confessions from the Analytic Couch. McCort is now retired from Syracuse University, where he taught German language and literature over a long career. He has authored scholarly books on Swiss writer C.F. Meyer and on the influence of Zen on Western writers such as J.D. Salinger, R.M. Rilke, and Thomas Merton, including Going beyond the Pairs: The Coincidence of Opposites in German Romanticism, Zen and Deconstruction.

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