"In English for the first time, a biting satirical novel about an untalented, self-delusioned celebrity who seduces all of Weimar Berlin. In Berlin, 1930, the name Kasebier is on everyone's lips. A literal combination of the German words for "cheese" and "beer," it's an unglamorous name for an unglamorous man--a small-time crooner who performs nightly on a shabby stage for laborers, secretaries, and shopkeepers. Until the press shows up. In the blink...

"The 13 stories in this welcome entry in Akashic's noir series, all set in 21st-century Berlin, are less about traditional crime and more likely to involve gentrification, immigrants, or Airbnb ... There's more than enough variety to entertain most readers."--Publishers Weekly "A city with a rich noir past looks beyond its history to an equally unsettling present ... Wörtche keeps his promise to show Berlin as 'always moving forward in the present'...

"BERLIN, 1931: Sisters raised in a Catholic orphanage, Berni and Grete Metzger are each other's whole world. That is, until life propels them to opposite sides of seedy, splendid, and violent Weimar Berlin. Berni becomes a cigarette girl, a denizen of the cabaret scene alongside her transgender best friend, who is considering a risky gender reassignment surgery. Meanwhile Grete is hired as a maid to a Nazi family, and begins to form a complicated...