For further information about our publishing house, we recommend this interview with mikrotext publisher Nikola Richter on The Writing Platform.
Jonas Mekas: Bum-Ba Bum-Ba. Conversations with John Lennon & Yoko Ono
December 1970, Regency Hotel, New York City: After a spontaneous film festival in the Elgin theatre for which Yoko Ono and John Lennon had produced two new films in only two weeks, the organiser Jonas Mekas and the two artists sat together, exhausted and probably also very happy. They talk about how the audience received the films and how Jonas Mekas managed to draw the attention from the famous couple to their works. Almost accidentially, the conversation touches many topics of creative production, from early childhood influences to collaboration, from heart beats in a waltz rhythm to electronic music, from realism to stutter to catharsis. And love and peace. This interview is taken from the Scrapbook of the Sixties by Jonas Mekas, published by Spector Books.
Out on 15 August 2017 About 120 pages on the smartphone, with filmstills
ISBN 978-3-944543-53-6
The number of representatives of digital publishing that Berlin has attracted in recent years is astonishing. Their lingua franca is a code that can be understood anywhere you go and is used across the world: the e-book code. As part of the Stadtsprachen Festival, taking place in Berlin in November 2016 and funded by the Hauptstadtkulturfonds, this reader look at what it is that constitutes this international digital voice. Four Berlin-based publisher-authors (Kathrin Passig of Techniktagebuch and others, Nikola Richter of mikrotext, Ansgar Warner of ebooknews, and Gregor Weichbrodt of 0x0a/Frohmann) share and discuss opinions, experiences, and challenges.
In addition, four important Berlin-based writers to think about their literary relationship with the internet.
Out on 24 October 2016, translated by Cory Tamler ca. 70 pages on the smartphone, accompaniment for the event Global & beta
ISBN 978-3-944543-42-0
Alan Mills: Hacking Coyote. Tricks for Digital Resistance
Thought-provoking essay on digital resistance, mixing Mayan knowledge, hacking theory and popular culture. Taking the coyote as the key figure for trickster philosophy. If you don’t yet know that the fox and the coyote can be read as symbols for destructive but simultaneously liberating deeds, if you haven’t yet learned to see them as transcultural trickster-hipsters, reading this poetic, associative and witty panorama will open your eyes.
Out on 22 September 2016 (ebook), 23 January 2017 (book)
ISBN 978-3-944543-38-3, ebook
ISBN 978-3-944543-43-7, book
Available as printed book: Amazon, bookshops in Germany, USA, UK.
Alan Mills was selected for the list of the most inspiring writers from South America Bogota39 in 2017: „Y el guatemalteco Alan Mills escribe tanto novela en español como ensayo en inglés. Son transgénero, como todos nosotros.“ (New York Times)
„At times the author’s approach reminds me of Walter Benjamin’s essay on Surrealism, in which he not only explains and describes it but in which the linguistic presentation of the material itself carries a surrealist poeticalness that seems to lead in part to a non-rational knowledge.“ (Eva Wißkirchen, comparaison d’etre)
„His chains of association are very daring in part … Like a conspiracy theorist. … The essay is a thoroughly spiritual text, which is written in religious imagery.“ (Enno Park, Kompressor/Deutschlandradio Kultur)
Patras Bwansi, Lydia Ziemke: My name is Bino Byansi Byakuleka. Double essay
Could you imagine to be a refugee and be treated like a criminal? How would you like to be welcomed? With the well-known Berlin activist Patras Bwansi you can relive this experience. He describes growing up in Uganda with school beatings, tells us about the constant bureaucratic supervision in the German „initial reception facilities“, colloquial also called „Lager“, as well as his personal outbreak into the protest, calling for humanitarian rights. That this will come only with a political and social rethinking, Lydia Ziemke shows in her text, which is inspired by her artistic work with refugees. If you want to read about Bwansi’s concise demands, you can download his manifesto in English for free as a PDF here. This publication in English was supported by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation.
Out on 21 July 2015 About 140 pages on the smartphone
With 6 photos und some asylum documents from Patras Bwansi’s personal archive ISBN 978-3-944543-25-3
„Moreover, Lydia Ziemke reflects her own attempt to pave the way into German daily life for a young Moroccan in her excellent critical essay on the ‚paradoxes of helping‘. She learns ‚lifelike‘ what Hannah Arendt postulated in 1943 in her essay ‚We Refugees‘ , namely that ‚human compassion can only take hold, when the refugees have been given legal justice‘.“ (Elke Heinemann, FAZ)
„We must learn to see the stereotypes behind the term asylum seekers. The book is a good start for that.“ (Susanne Memarnia, taz)
„As I was reading, I felt as being forever held in a transit space, especially since the words of Bwansi’s essay have the power to illuminate like spotlights the emotional states that I, equipped with ID cards and tickets, usually not experience.“ (Tania Folaji, Elektro vs print)
„These two texts are to completely change our thinking on the subject, according to the publisher’s announcement, and although such grandiose announcements are rarely met, this time it’s true.“ (Kevin Junk, Fixpoetry)
Chloe Zeegen: I love myself ok? A Berlin Trilogy
Young, angry and articulate, the narrator of Chloe Zeegen’s Berlin Trilogy moves to Berlin (drugs, clubs, parks and politics), outs herself on Facebook and tests her luck. Chloe Zeegen’s trilogy of short stories requires a genre all of its own. Social commentary? The Facebook generation’s sexual awakening? Zeegen’s spontaneous and conversational style reads like online chat intersected by passages of poetry. Her narrator experiences Berlin’s parties and private views, meets random people, assembles her Ikea bed, paces through history and turns an intellectual eye to pop architecture. Kreuzberg and Neukölln feature, as does the ‘Späti’ – the trusty Berlin 7-11. Fast-paced and in your face.
Out in October 2013 about 80 pages on a smartphone ISBN 978-3-944543-07-9
„C’était exaltant, c’était indé, c’était Patti Smith.“ (Mediapart/Moyen-Courrier about Chloe Zeegen’s ebook launch at Berlin-Katersalon at Rockmarket during the Frankfurt Book Fair 2013)
„Your writing brilliantly reflects that the real (in your case: your autobiography, buying drugs, questioning your sexuality) and the virtual (chatting to people on Facebook, Googling stupid shit) are always intertwined. You deconstruct the apparent dichotomies so easily, it’s astonishing. You do so without even talking about it. Your writing subtly reflects it. I love that.“ (Kristoffer Cornils, wolfauftausendplateaus)
I go to a bar on Oranienstraße. There’s some random there and we chat for a bit but pretty soon he’s like just moved here have you? think you’re an artist? it’s people like you who are destroying Berlin you fucking tourist. I laugh in his face give him the finger but I don’t just give him the finger I pretend to run my tongue over it up and down to show him just how much of a creative little bitch I am and that really pisses him off and his friends are like leave it leave it.
The author
Chloe Zeegen, born in 1980 in Watford, UK, is a writer and post-internet artist. She studied Philosophy & German at Oxford University and moved to Berlin in 2012, following a career in arts management in London. In 2012 she experimented with Facebook and Twitter as a platform and medium for first-hand art and creative writing in her multi-media, interactive project Chloe Zeegen is a self-styled Facebook star. This project formed the basis for her contemporary fiction, also initially published on Facebook. She featured in the debut issue of STILL Magazin and has performed her work at venues across Berlin. “I love myself ok? A Berlin Trilogy” is Zeegen’s first publication with mikrotext and her debut eBook.
Aboud Saeed: The Smartest Guy on Facebook. Status Updates from Syria
In 2011, the Syrian people revolted against the government, which then brutally fought back. At about the same time, 30-year-old Aboud Saeed began his personal revolution on Facebook. His daily status updates have become a literary documentation of his life.
Out in October 2013 (first published in German in March 2013) Translated from the Arabic by Yusuf Sabeel, Sandra Hetzl, Nik Kosmas; withan afterword and a glossary,about 250 pages on a smartphone, ISBN 978-3-944543-09-3
„The Syrian Bukowski.“ (Aspekte, Link to feature in German TV channel ZDF)
„Saeed’s Facebook feed is a lot of fun to read. It’s quippy and clever and exotic but relatable. … Saeed is perhaps the world master of humble brag.“ (Amanda DeMarco, Readux Reads)
„Read this book! It is wham!“ (Andreas Schäfer, Der Tagesspiegel)
Aboud Saeed was born in 1983 and lives in the township of Manbij, in the province of Aleppo in northern Syria. Manbij was heavily bombed by the Assad-regime in 2012 and early 2013. Aboud Saeed lives with his mother and seven siblings in one room in a small house. After the ninth grade, he left school, and trained to be a smith and welder. For the past 11 years, he’s worked in a workshop. For three years he was a foreign worker in a plastic factory in Lebanon, where he lived in a tin shack. In 2008, he received a high school equivalency diploma, and enrolled in a university to study economics. The university is currently closed due to the political situation. In 2009 Saeed created a Facebook account and posted there every day. The Smartest Guy on Facebook, a selection of his status updates, in which he writes about his mother, smoking, Facebook, love, and daily life during the violent Syrian conflict, is his first book, which has so far been translated into German, Spanish, Portuguese and Danish. The Lebanese newspaper Annahar wrote of him in late December 2012, “Going on Facebook without getting to know Aboud Saeed is like traveling to Paris without seeing the Eiffel Tower.” A collection of Saeed’s short stories Life-size Newsticker has been published with mikrotext in German in 2015.
The translators
Sandra Hetzl was born in 1980 in Munich and lives in Berlin. She studied Visual Culture Studies at the University of the Arts (UdK) and works as a documentary filmmaker and translator from the Arabic.
Nik Kosmas was born in 1985 in Minneapolis (USA). He lives and works in Berlin as an artist, consultant and personal trainer.
Yusuf Sabeel was born in the Manbaj of Somalia and grew up in California. He studied Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Over the past two years he has been traveling and working in North Africa, Europe and The Middle East. He currently lives in Rabat.
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