Minihorror

WINNER OF THE LEIPZIG BOOK FAIR PRIZE
'A very addictive short story collection' GUARDIAN
A guest at a New Year's Eve rooftop party finds a parallel universe in the building next door. A woman discovers her boyfriend's family are all made of cookie dough. A man bites into a bar of Alpine chocolate to realise it's infested with maggots.
Mini and Miki live in Vienna. They are not from here, but they try their best to fit in and carve themselves the perfect middle class routine. Nevertheless - and perhaps because of it - there's something not quite right about the place. Danger seems to lurk in every corner: a family breakfast, an office cubicle, a well-deserved holiday.
Minihorror is a surreal, delightful and terrifying collection about the agents of fear in our society from the most original and imaginative of a new generation of European writers - to read it is to feel at once caught-out and understood. Barbi Markovic dares to ask: could the real horror story be life itself?

Barbi Markovic was born in Belgrade in 1980 and has lived in Vienna since 2006. In 2009, Markovic caused a sensation with the Thomas Bernhard remix novel Ausgehen. In 2016, she published the novel Superheldinnen, for which she received the Alpha Literature Prize, the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize and the Priessnitz Prize. In 2024, Barbi Markovic received the Leipzig Book Fair Prize for Minihorror and the Carl Amery Literature Prize for her literary work.