"The sea became sluggish again, as it had been the night before. When we beat the water or paddled with our hands, strange, fluorescent dots flashed up, as if the movements of the body left streaks of fire in the water. Now and then I mustered up my strength and dived a meter or two, because this glitter play was absolutely mesmerizing. It looked like stars were shining on the bottom of the sea. Once I managed to stay under water for a long time. I didn't feel like I needed air, in fact I had enough oxygen in my lungs to swim around. Then I could fall asleep for a moment."

Xaver Bayer (1977), an Austrian writer who won the Hermann Lenz and Reinhard Priessnitz Prizes, masterfully captures the disturbing absurdity inherent in everyday life in his collection of short stories entitled Transparent Hands: because great mysteries can certainly be taken very seriously. But we can take them very funny sometimes. We can also laugh at how anxious we are sometimes as we find out what it would be like to have a taxi ride with Henry Kissinger, a battle with a modern-day Napoleon, or to completely black out an apartment while someone is sending empty messages from an unknown number. The author balances confidently on the thin border between reality and imagination, whether it is a tense, crime-like story, a masterfully drawn interior landscape or a description of the perfect assassination.