Nika 

Pfeifer

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between. Prose

Judith Nika Pfeifer, who has already made a name for herself with her extraordinary poetry, presents her first collection of stories with "zwischen". A promising fresh voice from Austria!

Unpretentiously and with fascinating ease Judith Nika Pfeifer tells of unheard-of incidents. The result is snapshots that bear witness to the absurdity of everyday life, unpredictable twists and turns, decisions made in haste, or events that change everything.

"What if?" Pfeifer asks, processing a historical event that ended in death; one of her characters gets involved in an unusual experiment that is supposed to help her out of a financial predicament; nuances are captured on a trip to Edinburgh.

Full of linguistic wit and with an exuberant inventiveness, Nika Pfeifer sketches in her stories the sensitive portrait of a young generation that has not yet found its place in the world: sometimes ironic, often thoughtful, exuberant and never sentimental. 

zwischen. Prosa

Judith Nika Pfeifer

Czernin, Vienna 2014

In many of the stories collected in between, Nika Pfeifer achieves the masterpiece of narrating with a light hand, concentrated and laconic in such a way that from sentence to sentence, with increasing tension, the free space grows in which these texts seem to float and to which they open up - it may be the free space of the always uncertain life, of the important questions, of meaning, love and death. One cannot expect more from short stories; and everything is redeemed here, also and perhaps especially where the 1975-born writer sovereignly portrays her own generation, which - between (sic!) instabile, precarious jobs and clarified or undecided love relationships, between media temptations and real disappointments - has a hard time settling down more decisively in existence.

Birgit Schwaner, Literaturhaus Wien

© 2024 Nika Pfeifer