Women and Clothes - Hardcover

Women And Clothes (Die Kleider der Frauen, 2009), a collection of stories arranged chronologically around a single unifying motif, has been praised by critics as a wonderful and surprising novel. The stories are deeply anchored in society while mirroring its constant flux and the ways in which clothes express - and conversely affect - a woman's sense of self from the cradle to the grave and beyond. Each story adds one more layer, facet, perspective, or color to the complex relationship women develop with their apparel and with themselves. Women and Clothes is a poignant and hilarious postmodern Bildungsroman that explores the external manifestations, the interior tensions, the seismic shifts, and the underlying fears and desires that determine the formation of female identity.

Brigitte Kronauer (b. 1940) is one of Germany’s most highly acclaimed contemporary women writers. With more than twenty-five volumes of stories, novels, and criticism she has established herself as a uniquely sophisticated literary voice and earned numerous honors, including the Heinrich-Böll-Preis, the Fontane-Preis, the Hubert-Fichte-Preis, the Joseph-Breitbach-Preis, and in 2005 the most coveted of all, the Georg-Büchner Preis. In her fiction she explores the complexities of human relations with empathy and zest, exposing human foibles with subtle irony and an exquisite sense of humor. Beneath its everyday surface her fiction deals with the eternal human questions of life, death, and love. At a still deeper level it circles around such philosophical issues as our futile attempts to find truth in our own constructs of reality.