CWRU Faculty Authors

This collection of excerpts and stories from German author Brigitte Kronauer provides an introduction to her work for the English-speaking world. Although highly regarded in her native land, she has remained virtually unknown outwith its boundaries. The excerpts and stories are annotated and preceded by critical introductions.

Fiction. Bilingual Edition. Translated from the German by Jutta Ittner. 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.