SMALLTOWNNOVELLA
SMALLTOWNNOVELLA
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About the Book
A previously-untranslated classic of the queer canon, SMALLTOWNNOVELLA follows b, a teenaged, working-class communist who falls in love with leif, a popular jock. When leif becomes fearful of the consequences of their affair, he instigates a community-wide assault. Written in a brilliant, all-lowercase, stream-of-consciousness, Schernikau’s 1980 novella is a radical reimagining of the German Bildungsroman.
Translated by Lucy Jones, with an afterword by Ben Miller.
Author
Ronald M. Schernikau
was born in 1960 in Magdeburg, East Germany and grew up in Hanover, West Germany. After completing his Abitur in 1980, he moved to West Berlin and studied German literature, philosophy, and psychology. In 1986, he started studying at the Institut für Literatur Johannes R. Becher (German Institute for Literature) in Leipzig, GDR. In 1989 he obtained GDR citizenship and relocated to Berlin. He worked as a dramaturge, and in radio and TV until his death in 1991. His publications include Kleinstadtnovelle (Small-Town Novella, 1980); Die Tage in L. (The Days in L., 1989); Legende (Legends, 1999); Königin im Dreck (Queen in the Dirt, 2009); and Irene Binz. Die Befragung (Irene Binz. The Interview, 2010).
Translator
Lucy Jones
is a British translator and writer based in Berlin. She is the translator of Brigitte Reimann’s Siblings, (Penguin Modern Classics), Anke Stelling’s Higher Ground (Scribe) and Annemarie Schwarzenbach’s Lyric Novella (Seagull Books), among others. Her translations and book reviews have appeared in Asymptote, Words Without Borders and CulturMag. She is the runner-up for the Society of Author’s Schlegel-Tieck Prize in 2023.
Contributor
Ben Miller
is a writer & historian living in Berlin. In 2024, he completed a PhD in Global Intellectual History summa cum laude at the Freie Universität. His dissertation, forthcoming as an academic monograph, is a history race and primitivism in the rise of gay liberation.
With Huw Lemmey, he hosts Bad Gays, a podcast about evil and complicated queers in history, which has been downloaded nearly two million times; a book based on the show and passionately arguing for a more complex and political queer public history, Bad Gays: A Homosexual History, was published by Verso in 2022.
His next book, a biography of the fashion designer Rudi Gernreich that doubles as a history of how the politics of liberation traveled from the European interwar avant-garde to 1960s California, is currently under contract with W. W. Norton.
Praise
Excerpt
i am afraid. am female, am male, double. feel my body departing from my body, see my white hands, my eyes in the mirror, i don’t want to be double who am I? want to be me, male, female, see only white. i am facing myself, want to reach myself, stretch my arms out towards myself where am i? i see, kiss, hug and intermingle. at some point lea appears, then reappears, and at last he is aware of her. b senses: he’s lying in bed, it’s morning, his room is blurry, he tries to take it in, feels the movement of his head, doesn’t try to steer it. no hope for a good day today, fuckingettingup, fuckingschool, fuckinglife. what pisses him off as usual is his mother trying to wake him, year after year the same words, phrases, that tone of voice. there’s no escape from her love, it makes her wake him so tenderly that waking is almost unbearably dragged out. his coming round, collecting himself, his crankiness are all reactions to the way she tries to staves off reality. if at lunch he tells her he was late for school again, that lat wound him up or he got to flirt with lenkel in lieu of an apology or that lehm got all moral on him about his constant sloppiness, she says: perhaps we should get up earlier, or she just accepts it. it’s impossible to get up earlier if only because the morning would be dull, a dull start tinges the whole day. even throwing back the cover is an effort, so he doesn’t, certain of another warning. the patient stage of her waking-up ritual is past, now she’s ratty, soon she’ll be adamant: when she gives up, he’ll get up.