Women and Stones
German, Droschl, 2025
” And the sculptress teaching the course says: Look at it this way—the chisel is a pen that smashes things.”
“I wake up three times in the night. The first time, everything is dark, except for a small dot of embers. The second time, the garden carves itself out of the darkness, leaf by leaf. The third time, an animal stands in front of the huge window and looks at me. It knows something I don’t. But before I’m fully awake and can ask it, it’s gone again.”
“Imagine a thread that connects you to all the people you love. Think about the colour of this thread as often as possible.”
Non-mothers, myths and marble – Regina Dürig’s first collection of stories contains a dozen sparkling, surprising stories and always takes a critical look at the problems of our time. Emotional, funny and really quirky.
In their own way, the female figures in the stories all raise the question of how to overcome the patriarchal petrification of the world. Regina Dürig uses extensive research to write fictionalised life stories about Alice Kober and Camille Claudel—and to track down what has been forgotten in their regular biographies. She has a horseshoe crab and the legendary figure Melusine philosophise about extinction in a strange podcast; a woman holds a salty monologue on self-determination; and much more.
In Women and Stones, there are clashes on all levels and there are no limits to the desire to tell stories. Regina Dürig is able to combine playful nonchalance with poetic elegance and thus create clever, ambiguous narratives.
- Title
- Frauen und Steine
- Publisher
- Droschl
- Translation rights
- Annette Knoch, rights@droschl.com
- Publication date
- 2025
- Pages
- 200
- ISBN
- 978-3-99059-179-6
Author
Regina Dürig
Regina Dürig was born in Mannheim in 1982 and now lives in Biel. She is an author and lecturer in literary writing and has written in various formats, including experimental prose, radio plays, children’s books, youth novels and performative texts. Regina Dürig has received numerous awards for her work, including the Peter Härtling Prize and the Wartholz Literature Prize. In 2021, the publishing house Droschl released Regina Dürig’s novella Losing Skin (Federn lassen), for which she won the Literature Prize of the Canton of Bern and the Weinfelder Book Prize. Her new book, Women and Stones (Frauen und Steine), was awarded the 2025 Bayern 2 Prize for Literature.
Photo: © Anja Fonseka