Nothing But Ghosts

A short-story collection following several women whose respective relationships are all on the turn in some way and have passed their first flush of romantic love.

The brilliant second collection of stories from Germany’s answer to Zadie Smith. Judith Hermann’s first collection, Summerhouse, Later, sold over 250,000 hardcovers in Germany and was short-listed for both the IMPAC award and the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. In Nothing but Ghosts, she portrays a generation in a new and precarious stage—she describes relationships with painstaking honesty, filling in the silences where communication has begun to falter and the gaze begins to turn elsewhere.

Author Biography

Judith Hermann was born in Berlin in 1970. She is the author of several novels and story collections, including Alice, which was short-listed for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize; Where Love Begins; and Summerhouse, Later, which won the Kleist Prize. Her novel Daheim (Home) was a Spiegel bestseller, won the Rheingau and the Bremen Literature Prizes, and was nominated for the Leipzig Book Fair Prize. Her work has been translated into thirty-five languages, and a number of her short stories have been adapted for film. She lives and works in Berlin.

Margot Bettauer Dembo (1928-2019) was the translator of works by Judith Hermann, Robert Gernhardt, Joachim Fest, Ödön von Horváth, and Feridun Zaimoglu, among others. She was awarded the Goethe-Institut/Berlin Translator’s Prize in 1994 and the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize in 2003. Dembo also worked as a translator for two feature documentary films: The Restless Conscience, which was nominated for an Academy Award, and The Burning Wall.