Swallow Summer

Two music producers pack up their studio - along with their dreams of ever making it in the industry - after too many bands fail to pay their bills... A woman takes up an invitation to visit an ex-lover in Arizona, only to find his apartment is no bigger than a motel room... A former drama student runs into an old classmate from ten years before, hardly recognising the timid creature he’s become... Each character in Larissa Boehning’s debut collection experiences a moment where they’re forced to confront how differently things turned out, how quickly ambitions were shelved, or how easily people change. Former colleagues meet up to reminisce about the failed agency they used to work for; brothers-in-law find themselves co-habiting long after the one person they had in common passed away; fellow performers watch as their careers slowly drift in opposite directions. Boehning’s stories offer a rich store of metaphors for this abandonment: the downed tools of a deserted East German factory, lying exactly where they were dropped the day Communism fell; the old, collected cameras of a late father that seem to stare, wide-eyed, at the world he left behind. And yet, underpinning this abandonment, there is also great resilience. Like the cat spotted by a demolition worker in the penultimate story that sits, unflinching, as its home is bulldozed around it, certain spirits abide.

Larissa Boehning was born in 1971, lives in Berlin and works as a graphic designer, lecturer and freelance writer. Larissa’s short story from this collection, Silent Fish, Sweetheart, won the 2002 Prenzlauer Berg Literature Prize. Her debut novel Lichte Stoffe, Light Materials (Eichborn, 2007) was longlisted for the German Book Prize and received the city of Pinneberg’s Culture Prize and the Mara Cassens Prize for best debut novel in 2007. Her novels since include Das Glück der Zikaden, The Song of the Cicadas (Galiani, 2011), and most recently Nichts davon stimmt, aber alles ist wehr, None of it’s Right, but it’s All True (Galiani, 2014).