Plenty of Life – Stories
»Better to have a bloody nose and be happy.«
Plenty of life – plenty of lives – is what Helga Schubert served up to us in her first short story collection in 1975. Girlfriends living alone who aren’t as alone as they might think; Anna who isn’t too meticulous but tends to do whatever tickles her fancy; a late bloomer who unexpectedly finds herself a husband “because she felt as she had never felt before”; or a family lapsing into chaos because the child wants a dog. Plenty of life, even when a story is set at a graveyard. With subtle irony, empathy and literary panache, Helga Schubert writes about totally ordinary people in the GDR. The tragedy and comedy of everyday life are portrayed in crystal-clear language as Helga sketches whole life stories with a few seemingly simple strokes of her pen.
- The debut of the bestselling author
- Helga Schubert’s total print-run at dtv: over 350,000 copies
- »It was and is one of the truly great little stories. Now everyone in the whole German-speaking world knows it and that is to everyone’s benefit.« – Johanna Steiner, taz am Wochenende
Helga Schubert, born in 1940 in Berlin, was a psychotherapist and writer in the GDR. She had withdrawn from public literary life until she won the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize in 2020 with her story ‘On Getting Up’. The eponymous volume of short stories was published by dtv in 2021 and was nominated for the Leipzig Book Fair Prize. ‘This Day. A Book of Hours on Love’ was published in 2023, and in 2024, Helga Schubert was awarded the German Federal Cross of Merit.
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