LAUGH AND DIE

YouTube premiere "From Kreisky's living room"

Amin Thurnher and Franz Schuh talk about the book

LAUGH AND DIE

 „Franz Schuh is a titanically educated thinker and linguistic stylist of the highest elegance. Metaphors, aphorisms, wordplay and punchlines in his style used to exist in the blessed times of Karl Kraus, Polgar, Kuh and Friedell - since then there has only been him.“
Eva Menasse, Die Zeit

The balladeer Markus Augustin once fell into the plague pit while intoxicated and would have been buried there had his babbling not been heard. He was pulled out and went on his rounds unharmed. Franz Schuh is in many ways the exact opposite of dear Augustin. But this inimitable book proves what the two have in common: with a laugh, it confronts fate, on the one hand metaphysically and on the other very concretely, by showing the dialectic of laughter and death using examples from popular culture (Helmut Qualtinger, Otto Schenk, Lukas Resetarits and others). The stylistic brilliance of Schuh's unsparing sentences is unique and sparkling - „Everyone multiplies, I reduce myself, every day I become less.“

Franz Schuh, born in Vienna in 1947, studied philosophy, history and German literature. He is a writer, lecturer at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna and a columnist for magazines and radio stations. His awards include the Leipzig Book Fair Prize in 2006 and the Austrian Art Prize in 2011. Most recently published by Zsolnay All passions (2014) and Fortuna. From the magazine of happiness (2017).

Armin Thurnher, publisher of the Butterfly, Author

In co-operation with the Zsolnay Publishing House

Franz Schuh: Laughing and dying
Zsolnay, March 2021, 336 pages
ISBN 978-3-552-07229-9