There‘s a lot going on in QualityLand, the best of all possible countries. Every month is the hottest since weather records began, the drones are behaving very strangely and a billionaire wants to become president. Peter Jobless is finally allowed to work as a machine therapist and tries to solve the relationship problems of household appliances. Meanwhile, Kiki Unknown snoops into her own past and gets grief from a remote-controlled killer. And then there‘s the thing with World War III. Marc-Uwe Kling‘s funny dystopia about humans and machines in a big-data world enters its second round!
A book full of clever ideas, quirky characters and amazing plot twists.

QualityLand is a fun dystopia that plays in a near future. The novel takes the reader to an unspecified western country, which for reasons of image was renamed. In QualityLand work, leisure time and relationships are optimized by algorithms. QualityPartner knows who is best suited to you. The self-driving car knows where you want to go. And anyone who is registered with TheShop will receive all the products he or she wants, without having to order them, because the system knows what everybody wants. No one is forced any more to take difficult decisions – because in QualityLand the answer to every question is: OK.

Nevertheless, the machine-scrapper Peter begins to suspect that something is wrong with his life. If the system is really so perfect, why are there drones that suffer from fear of flight, or combat robots with post-traumatic stress disorder? Why did the system rate him at level 10, only one level above the single-digit range, where people are considered “useless”? Why does his girlfriend Sandra Admin unhesitatingly leave him during a romantic dinner when QualityPartner offers her a better partner as an upgrade? And why the hell does he get a pink vibrator in form of a dolphin from TheShop? Peter decides to return the unwanted product, but that’s not at all easy.

An astonishing futuristic satire about the promises and pitfalls of digitisation. Visionary, profound and very, very funny.

In The Kangaroo Chronicles (“Die Känguru-Chroniken”) the author Marc-Uwe Kling lives together with a kangaroo and writes funny songs and stories. His business model is to publish books that fiercely criticize capitalism and sell incredibly well. The kangaroo came to Germany as a guest-worker. It is a communist and an antifascist, but most of the time behaves like an anarchist. Like every real kangaroo it loves boxing, always carries boxing gloves in its bag and founded the “Fight Club”, where people are trained to fight Nazis. Its antipathy to capitalism is easy to understand when it plays Monopoly with Marc-Uwe: the kangaroo doesn’t accept any rules, refuses to pay the rent for entering a house and squats in it; then all houses, train stations, the waterworks and the electricity power station are claimed free for the public. The game ends surprisingly in a tie. It is really into Nirvana. It’s a classical Berlin flat-sharing community, where the deep questions of life are hotly debated: is lying in a hammock already a kind of passive resistance? Must the kangaroo place its pouch onto the conveyor belt at the airport security check? Did the kangaroo really fight for the Vietcong? And why is it addicted to champagne truffles?

In The Kangaroo Manifest (“Das Känguru-Manifest”) they are back again: the communist kangaroo and the stoic artisan. In their fight against the mysterious Ministry of Productivity they are not afraid of anything. A conspiracy at the lowest level. Spectacular revelations. Scandals. Something crazy about religion. Wonderfully slanting stories – with fun, excitement and champagne truffles.

The Kangaroo Revelation (“Die Känguru-Offenbarung”) is the fulminating sequel to the sequel: the marsupial and the minky artist on the hunt for the mysterious penguin. Get ready: This is the revelation of the kangaroos to show the Asocial Network what will happen in the near future.

The Kangaroo Apocrypha (“Die Känguru-Apokryphen”) will guide you through all of life situations. Whether it‘s a meeting with Donald Trump or Kim-Jong Un‘s birthday, you‘ll have the arguments on your side in small talk. This book teaches you how to become smarter, more self-reliant and slimmer in your sleep. It will influence your opinions on the following topics: Craftsmen, Coriander, Nazis, Potters, Social Democrats. There is also a kangaroo in it.

Marc-Uwe Kling has created a new novel universe together with his 12-year-old twin daughters Johanna and Luise Kling. The Clue Finder (“Der Spurenfinder”) is a fantasy crime comedy about an unusual trio of investigators.
“Elos von Bergen was not just any clue seeker. It was he who solved the riddle of the Obelisk of Tarnok. He brought the Countess of Oberlinden back her griffin. He caught the dream killer of Altschwanenberg. He was the most famous clue seeker of the Lost Provinces. Although he would never have called himself a clue seeker. Elos von Bergen was a clue finder.”
Elos von Bergen has actually given up clue-finding since a case with a vindictive night-wizard almost cost him and his children Ada and Naru their lives. That’s why the three of them have been living in Friedhofen, the sleepiest village in the entire kingdom (its name literally means “graveyard”), for several years now. There, Elos works on writing his twenty-volume memoirs – much to the chagrin of the children, who are bored to tears in such a backwater. But then a mysterious murder occurs in Friedhofen, of all places, which drags Elos into the trickiest case of his life. And if he thinks his children will stay at home and twiddle their thumbs in the meantime, he is very much mistaken.

And not only is Princess Head-of-Snot (“Prinzessin Popelkopf”) stupid, she’s also mean, which is why a little witch curses her and turns her into what her name means. From now on, the princess must actually wear a giant snot-filled head on her neck. Her father, King Stinkfoot Headof-Snot, suggests that she should change her name and thus her appearance by getting married. However, the picky princess does not wish to marry Prince Poop-Puss nor Sir Zit because she is in love with Duke Doofus.“ The rhymes in Marc-Uwe Kling’s cheerfully impolite children’s story, about superficialities and the power to change oneself, will have both children and adults laughing out loud. With imaginative and quirky illustrations by Astrid Henn.

No one stands for what came to be called the “Frankfurt School” in the 1960s like Max Horkheimer. The son of a textile manufacturer, in 1930 he took over the management of the Marxist “Institute for Social Research” with the aim of contrasting his father’s world of competition and profit-making with the alternative of a life dedicated to knowledge and characterised by solidarity. Forced into exile by the Nazis, the institute became a place of collaboration between intellectuals from different disciplines and continued to shape the intellectual development of the Federal Republic after its return to Germany. This new and up-to-date account of Horkheimer’s life and work offers an introduction and an overall view of this central thinker of the 20th century.

Rolf Wiggershaus provides a clear account of Theodor W. Adorno’s philosophical motifs, socio-critical and contemporary diagnostic analyses, as well as his theoretical views on art, and presents the versatile intellectual as an imaginative critic of prevailing social practices.

Today the “Frankfurt School” is synonymous with one of the twentieth century’s most important philosophical and sociological schools, and with the work of such outstanding intellectuals as Horkheimer, Adorno, Benjamin, Marcuse, Fromm, Habermas and others. Their names also stand for a continuous reflection on the pathologies of modernism, for the argumentative aspiration to a responsible, enlightened world.

The Frankfurt School outlines the history of that group from the foundation of the “Frankfurter Institut für Sozialforschung” in the Weimar Republic to its members’ exile in the United States, their return to Germany after the war, and the early 1970s. The book combines critically reconstructed biographies, the history of the institute, the development of the theory, and the presentation of the scholarly environment and socio-political background.

Wiggershaus published also a concise monograph on Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer and Jürgen Habermas, which describe their biographical background and their importance as philosophers. These books are an excellent introduction and are highly suitable for students of Letters, Arts, and Philosophy.

We represent The Frankfurt School for Spanish and Portuguese only.