Gekürztes Hörbuch "Hol Oma von der Bowle weg!"

Wer denkt, Weihnachten mit der Verwandtschaft sei hart, war noch nie mit ihr in den Ferien! Egal, ob Cousinentreffen in der Provinz (Wer sind diese Menschen?), Städtetrip mit den Geschwistern (Fällt es wohl auf, wenn ich in der Altstadt verloren gehe?) oder Kreuzfahrt mit den Eltern (Paar über Bord!): Was anfangs nach einer guten Idee klang, entpuppt sich vor Ort als Stresstest. Und liefert im nachhinein Stoff für die besten Geschichten! Grandios interpretiert von Mirja Boes und Bernd Stelter.

SIE STERBEN - WIR KÜMMERN UNS UM DEN REST!

Seitdem Dietmar seine Brötchen als Trauerredner verdienen muss, holt er sich auf regelmäßigen Spaziergängen über den Friedhof seine Inspiration. Eines Abends beobachtet er zwei Männer, die einen dubiosen Sack in ein noch frisches Grab einbuddeln. Zu seinem Erstaunen erkennt Dietmar in den Männern zwei ehemalige Künstlerkollegen, die während der Coronazeit aus Existenzangst ins Bestattergewerbe gewechselt haben. Allerdings eher in den illegalen Zweig, der Bestattungen zu wahren Discounterpreisen verspricht. Dietmar klinkt sich begeistert in das Geschäft ein und hat auch bald eine mörderisch gute Idee, wie man den Kundenservice noch verbessern könnte...

Ein schwarzhumoriger, augenzwinkernder Krimi von Spiegel-Bestseller-Autor Dietmar Bittrich.

Kathi und Effi sind seit Ewigkeiten beste Freundinnen. Beide wollen Kinder. Doch mit Mitte 30 geht der Wunsch nicht mehr so leicht in Erfüllung: Kathi erfährt, dass sie unfruchtbar ist. Also Adoption: In den kommenden zwei Jahren ziehen Kathi und ihr Mann sich vor den Familienbehörden bis auf die Unterhosen aus, füllen Papierberge aus und erdulden VHS-Kurse - während Effi tatsächlich schwanger wird. Sie kämpft in der Folge gegen übergriffige Ratschläge, Übelkeitsattacken und die ständige Sorge um das Ungeborene. Und Kathi hingegen wartet immer noch auf den Anruf, der sie zur Mutter werden lässt. Eine Freundschaft durch dick und dünn, vom Jugendamt bis in den Kreißsaal. Falls irgendjemand noch denkt, Familie sei reine Privatsache: Dieses Hörbuch zeigt, dass sie mehr ist.

Emotional und amüsant erzählt Lea Streisand in dem Roman Hätt' ich ein Kind von den Hürden des Mutterwerdens. Das Hörbuch wird von der Autorin selbst gesprochen.

Sie wird von der Politik kaputtgespart und gleichzeitig als Klimaretter gepriesen, und vielleicht teilen wir ja alle dieses sonderbare Verhältnis zwischen Geringschätzung und Zuneigung, wenn es um dieses gute alte Verkehrsmittel geht: die Bahn. Wer hätte nicht schon geflucht, wenn sie mal wieder Nena-Style fährt (irgendwo, irgendwie, irgendwann) oder uns mangels erreichbarer Anschlusszüge in Elsterwerda übernachten lässt? Und wer fühlte, andererseits, nicht auch tiefe Verbundenheit, sei es aus Gründen des Komforts (alles nichts gegen eine Flugreise vom Berliner BER) oder der Nostalgie (Klassenfahrt im Nachtzug)?

Vor allem aber ist die Bahn einer der allerletzten Orte, an dem alle Milieus, Klassen, Stile und Weltanschauungen ganz hart und direkt aufeinandertreffen. Wo sonst erlebt man heute noch so viele unvermutete Begegnungen, mit Leuten, die man nie kennenlernen wollte, und Personen, deren Intimstes man schutzlos erfährt - aber auch zauberhafte Momente mit besonderen, gar reizvollen Menschen?

Von alldem lässt sich wunderbar erzählen, und das tun in diesem Hörbuch Autorinnen und Autoren auf herrlich komische Weise. Ein Hörbuch voller Geschichten, die man nicht erfinden könnte - Geschichten, wie sie nur die Bahn schreibt.

Alle Jahre wieder macht sich die halbe Republik kurz vor den Feiertagen auf den Weg zur buckligen Verwandtschaft. Als ob der Besuch bei Tante und Onkel nicht schon schlimm genug wäre, quälen wir uns stundenlang durch den Stau, fluchen über den ICE in verkehrter Wagenreihung oder sitzen auf dem verschneiten Rollfeld fest, während unser Airbus zum wiederholten Mal enteist wird. Und das alles umgeben von nicht minder nervigen Nichten, Neffen, Omas und Opas, die sich ebenfalls nicht vor dem Besuch bei der Familie zu drücken wussten.

Was tropft da unterm Weihnachtsbaum? Jedes Jahr aufs Neue müssen wir uns an Weihnachten mit der buckligen Verwandtschaft herumschlagen: dem klugscheißenden Onkel, der überdrehten Tante, dem betrunkenen Schwiegervater, der esoterischen Schwägerin und den handysüchtigen Nichten und Neffen. Die Großeltern fordern Gedichte, die Eltern zanken, die Geschwister reden kein Wort miteinander. Einziger Trost: Bei anderen zu Hause läuft es nicht besser. Im Gegenteil.

Weihnachten - wie immer ein Fest!

Neue lustige Geschichten über Weihnachten mit der buckligen Verwandtschaft: Wer hat eigentlich den Cousin dritten Grades eingeladen? Was hat Opa schon alles getrunken? Wo ist die Katze hin? Und wer, bitte, fährt die Schwiegereltern nach Hause? Weihnachten gleicht alle Jahre wieder einem Stresstest für die gesamte Familie. Erträglicher wird’s nur mit diesen Geschichten. Und komischer auf jeden Fall.

Brand-new stories by: T. Jefferson Parker, Don Winslow, Luis Alberto Urrea, Gar Anthony Haywood, Gabriel R. Barillas, Maria Lima, Debra Ginsberg, Diane Clark & Astrid Bear, Ken Kuhlken, Lisa Brackmann, Cameron Pierce Hughes, Morgan Hunt, Jeffrey J. Mariotte, Martha C. Lawrence, and Taffy Cannon.

From the introduction by Maryelizabeth Hart:

“The southwestern-most metropolis in the contiguous United States, resting a mere 40 feet above sea level, tends to garner positive national attention. San Diego is home to the world-famous San Diego Zoo, Balboa Park (with its history reaching back to the 1915-1916 Panama-California Exposition), temperate climes, and a sunny reputation. It is also the home of shooter Brenda Ann 'I Don’t Like Mondays' Spencer, disgraced Congressman Randy 'Duke’ Cunningham, and San Diego County medical examiner-turned-killer Kristin Rossum...."

"The city is sometimes referred to as San Diego - Tijuana, a conurbation, with all its attendant border issues - illustrated in true noir fashion in Orson Welles’ classic Touch of Evil, adapted from Badge of Evil by Whit Masterson. A ways up the coast from the border lies the grave of Raymond Chandler, who resided in the wealthy enclave of La Jolla from 1946 to 1959; that area masquerades at “Esmerlada” in Playback, his final Philip Marlowe novel.... I hope that enjoying this intriguing collection will result in you not just thinking of Shamu (the whale of SeaWorld fame), but maybe a shamus or two, when America’s Finest City comes to mind."

Brand-new stories by: Daniel Woodrell, Matthew Eck, Catherine Browder, Nancy Pickard, John Lutz, J. Malcolm Garcia, Kevin Prufer, Linda Rodriguez, Nadia Pflaum, Phong Nguyen, Andres Rodriguez, and others. Kansas City: where East and West collide, where naked ambition meets broken dreams, where blues and the night go together like rye whiskey, vermouth, and bitters. Yes, Kansas City is a surprising place of grit, gore, and betrayal, at least in the imaginations of our diverse lineup of contributors. Kansas City Noir, another in Akashic's series of geographically specific anthologies, peels back the aura of civility and captures the raw truths of the human condition as lived in this heartland, third-coast city. Among the collection's contributors are Daniel Woodrell, author of the modern classic Winter's Bone and the recent, much lauded story collection, The Outlaw Album; Matthew Eck, author of the noted war novel The Farther Shore; veteran short-fiction writer Catherine Browder; Edgar Award-winning mystery novelists Nancy Pickard and John Lutz; and J. Malcolm Garcia, whose reporting from the war in Afghanistan informs a disturbing tale of restless angst and dislocation. Kansas City Noir takes a compelling tour of the streets of a vibrant American city, complete with accents of jazz, barbecue, and the deeply rooted blues.

Featuring brand-new stories by: Kathleen Kent, Ben Fountain, James Hime, Harry Hunsicker, Matt Bondurant, Merritt Tierce, Daniel J. Hale, Emma Rathbone, Jonathan Woods, Oscar C. Pea, Clay Reynolds, Lauren Davis, Fran Hillyer, Catherine Cuellar, David Haynes, and J. Suzanne Frank.

From the introduction by David Hale Smith: My favorite line in my favorite song about Dallas goes like this: Dallas is a rich man with a death wish in his eyes / A steel and concrete soul in a warm heart and love disguise... The narrator of Jimmie Dale Gilmore's perfect tune "Dallas" is coming to town as a broke dreamer with the bright lights of the big city on his mind. He's just seen the Dallas cityscape through the window of his seat on a DC-9 at night. Is he just beginning his quest? Or is he on his way home, flying out of Love Field, reminiscing after seeing the woman who stepped on him when he was down? In a country with so many interesting cities, Dallas is often overlooked except on November 22 every year. The heartbreaking anniversary keeps coming back around in a nightmare loop, for all of us. On that day in 1963, Dallas became American noir. A permanent black scar on its history that will never be erased, no matter how many happy business stories and hit television shows arise from here. In a stark ongoing counterweight to the JFK tragedy are those two iterations of the TV show. Dallas is not a TV show. It's a real city... For the past 40 years, my capacity to be surprised by it has not diminished one bit. I hope the stories in this collection will surprise you too.

Launched by the summer '04 award-winning best-seller Brooklyn Noir, Akashic Books continues its groundbreaking series of original noir anthologies. Each book is comprised of all-new stories, each one set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the respective city. Brand-new stories by: Irwin Allan Sealy, Omair Ahmad, Radhika Jha, Ruchir Joshi, Nalinaksha Bhattacharya, Meera Nair, Siddharth Chowdhury, Mohan Sikka, Palash K. Mehrotra, Hartosh Singh Bal, Hirsh Sawhney, Tabish Khair, Uday Prakash, and Manjula Padmanabhan.

The eyes of the world are gazing at India - the world's largest democracy. But the books you read about this Asian giant only show part of the picture. Delhi Noir offers bone-chilling, mesmerizing takes on the country's chaotic capital, a city where opulence and poverty are constantly clashing, where old-world values and the information age wage a constant battle. Delhi Noir's 15 original stories are written by the best Indian writers alive today - the ones you haven't yet heard of but should have. They are veteran authors who have appeared on the Booker Prize short list and budding geniuses who your grandchildren will read about in English class. Delhi Noir is a world of sex in parks, male prostitution, and vigilante rickshaw drivers. It is one plagued by religious riots, soulless corporate dons, and murderous servants. This is India uncut, the one you're missing out on because mainstream publishing houses and glossy magazines can't stomach it.

Step into Indian Country. Enter the dark welter of troubled history throughout the Americas, where the heritage of violence meets the ferocity of intent. Features brand-new stories by: Mistina Bates, Jean Rae Baxter, Lawrence Block, Joseph Bruchac, David Cole, Reed Farrel Coleman, O'Neil De Noux, A.A. Hedge Coke, Gerard Houarner, Liz Martnez, R. Narvaez, Kimberly Roppolo, Leonard Schonberg, and Melissa Yi.

Sarah Cortez, a law enforcement officer, is the award-winning author of the poetry collection How to Undress a Cop. She brings her heritage as a Tejana with Mexican, French, Comanche, and Spanish blood to the written page. Liz Martnez's stories have appeared in Manhattan Noir, Queens Noir, and Cop Tales 2000. She is a member of Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers, and she lives in New York.

Featuring brand-new stories by: Annie Zaidi, R. Raj Rao, Abbas Tyrewala, Avtar Singh, Ahmed Bunglowala, Smita Harish Jain, Sonia Faleiro, Altaf Tyrewala, Namita Devidayal, Jerry Pinto, Kalpish Ratna, Riaz Mulla, Paromita Vohra, and Devashish Makhija.

Bombay's communal riots of 1992 - in which Hindus were alleged to be the primary perpetrators - were followed by retaliatory bomb blasts in 1993, masterminded by the Muslim-dominated underworld. Over a thousand citizens lost their lives in these internecine bouts of violence and thousands more became refugees in their own city. In a matter of months, Bombay ceased to be the cosmopolitan, wholesome, and middle-class bastion it had been for decades. When the city was renamed Mumbai in 1995, it merely formalized the widespread perception that the Bombay everyone knew and remembered had been lost forever. Today Mumbai is like any other Asian city on the rise, with gigantic construction cranes winding atop upcoming skyscrapers and malls. It continues to have the highest GDP among Indian cities and one of the most expensive real estate markets in the world. Mukesh Ambani, the world's fourth-richest man, calls Mumbai home. As do seventeen million other people, for a majority of whom life remains a fine balance, to borrow Rohinton Mistry's description, between survival and penury, between lawfulness and maverick restlessness, and often between life and death. Right-wing violence, failing electricity and water supplies, overcrowding, and the ever-looming threat of terrorist attacks - these are some of the gruesome ground realities that Mumbai’s middle and working classes must deal with every day, while the city's super-rich, like the aforementioned Ambani, zip from roof to roof in their private choppers. Abandoned by its wealthy, mistreated by its politicians and administrators, Mumbai continues to thrive primarily because of the helpless resilience of its hardworking, upright citizens.

Launched by the summer '04 award-winning best-seller Brooklyn Noir, Akashic Books continues its groundbreaking series of original noir anthologies. Each book is comprised of all-new stories, each one set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the city of the book. Brand new crime fiction stories from: Jeffery Deaver, Lawrence Block, Charles Ardai, Carol Lea Benjamin, Thomas H. Cook, Jim Fusilli, Robert Knightly, John Lutz, Liz Martínez, Maan Meyers, Martin Meyers, S.J. Rozan, Justin Scott, C.J. Sullivan, and Xu Xi.

From the introduction by Lawrence Block: "Readers of Brooklyn Noir will recall that its contents were labeled by neighborhood - Bay Ridge, Canarsie, Greenpoint, etc. We have chosen the same principle here, and the book's contents do a good job of covering the island, from C.J. Sullivan's Inwood and Charles Ardai's Upper East Side, to Justin Scott's Chelsea and Carol Lea Benjamin's Greenwich Village. The range in mood and literary style is at least as great; noir can be funny, it can stretch to include magic realism, it can be ample or stark, told in the past or present tense, and in the first or third person. I wouldn't presume to define noir - if we could define it, we wouldn’t need to use a French word for it - but it seems to me that it’s more a way of looking at the world than what one sees."

Launched with the summer '04 award-winning best-seller Brooklyn Noir, Akashic Books continues its groundbreaking series of original noir anthologies. Each book is comprised of all-new stories, each one set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the geographical area of the book. Original stories by: Lena Eltang, Sergei Nosov, Alexander Kudriavstev, Andrei Kivinov, Julia Belomlinsky, Natalia Kurchatova, Ksenia Venglinskaya, Eugene Kogan, Anton Chizh, Vladimir Berezin, Andrei Rubanov, and others.

St. Petersburg boasts to have the strongest spirit of all Russian cities, and indeed the dark metaphysics of this city captivate tourists and locals alike. When you think of St. Petersburg noir, some of the greatest literary names immediately spring to mind - Alexander Pushkin, Nikolay Gogol, and Fyodor Dostoevsky. Modern day St. Petersburg lavishly offers the scenery and conditions for true noir stories, and the writers in St. Petersburg Noir succeed in concocting their own worlds within this city with stories ranging from mystical to outwardly grotesque. Within this collection, you'll meet characters who populate the narrow streets and unlit inner yards in the vast historical center winking at ghosts from pages of Dostoevsky's novels (Nutcracker); you'll hear of criminal activities settled behind the locked doors of magnificent palaces and museums (The Witch Hour and The Last Skinhead); and you'll follow the path of a police officer on his first day of duty maddeningly chasing a doppelganger... of a corpse (The First Duty).

Brand-new stories by: James W. Hall, Barbara Parker, John Dufresne, Paul Levine, Carolina Garcia-Aguilera, Tom Corcoran, Christine Kling, George Tucker, Kevin Allen, Anthony Dale Gagliano, David Beaty, Vicki Hendricks, John Bond, Preston L. Allen, Lynne Barrett, Jeffrey Wehr.

From the introduction by Les Standiford: "The truth is that Miami, though naturally lovely, is a frontier town, perched on the border between the known and the rarely before experienced. The poet Richard Hugo once said that the natural place for the writer was on the edge, and 'edge' might well be the definitive word when it comes to this city... We are not only on the edge of the continent, we are to this country what New York was in Ellis Island's heyday, what the West Coast was in the middle of the 20th century. This is where the new arrivals debark these days, and it is no mistake that during the last decade of the last century, commentators as diverse as Joan Didion, David Rieff, and T.D. Allman devoted entire volumes to Miami's role as the harbinger for America's future... But for now, the novel of crime and punishment is the perfect vehicle to convey the spirit and the timbre of this brawling place to a wider world."

Launched with the summer '04 award-winning best-seller Brooklyn Noir, Akashic Books continues its groundbreaking series of original noir anthologies. Each book is comprised of all-new stories, each one set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the city of the book.

Los Angeles Times book critic David L. Ulin has been vacationing in Cape Cod every summer since he was a boy. He knows the terrain inside out; enough to identify the squalid underbelly of this allegedly idyllic location. His editing prowess is a perfect match for this fine volume.

From the introduction by David L. Ulin: "For me, Cape Cod is a repository of memory: forty summers in the same house will do that to you. But it is also a landscape of hidden tensions, which rise up when we least anticipate. In part, this has to do with social aspiration, which is one of the things that brought my family, like many others, to the Cape. In part, it has to do with social division, which has been a factor since at least the end of the nineteenth century, when then summer trade began. There are lines here, lines that get crossed and lines that never get crossed, the kinds of lines that form the web of noir. Call it what you want - summer and smoke is how I think of it - but that's the Cape Cod at the center of this book."