Feline (pronounced Falina – she’s named after the little deer-friend Bambi makes in the original German book by Felix Salten) was born in Germany but grew up in the wilds of North Wales. She was homeschooled to the age of ten, learning about mosses and birds and listening to plays on the radio. She has lived in Berlin, northern France, Cornwall and London. Feline has had many jobs, from river surveyor to pizza chef. She has three children, and recently moved to South Devon.
Feline has had a number of short stories and essays published, in print and online, and she is currently studying for an MA in Creative Writing at Lancaster University.
As a writer one of my biggest preoccupations is the stories we tell ourselves, the narratives we invent in order to feel good about ourselves, or at least, in order to survive. The human mind is a narrative driven machine, it looks for meaning, it is hardwired to find narrative structure. It is one of the reasons storytellers have held such sway over us for all this time, and why the media is such a powerful force in
I was a little over 30 when my partner at the time and I took our campervan through France. Along with our camping equipment, a dog-eared roadmap of France and only rudimentary French, we brought along our six-month-old daughter. It turned out she did not like being on the road as much as we did. Somehow, despite a schedule packed mainly with singing ‘Old MacDonald’ at the top of our lungs every time we got back behind the
“We are continually overflowing toward those who preceded us, toward our origin, and toward those who seemingly come after us. … It is our task to imprint this temporary, perishable earth into ourselves so deeply, so painfully and passionately, that its essence can rise again “invisibly,” inside us. We are the bees of the invisible. We wildly collect the honey of the visible, to store it in the great golden hive of the invisible.” – Rainer Maria Rilke
While reading, I constantly remind myself to view it not just through the lens of my own reaction. How would this read if it were in English? Is it very specific to a German-language reader, or would anyone else be interested in this too? – Feline Charpentier NBG reader Feline Charpentier looks back on two decades of writing reader reports for New Books in German ↗
My son is terrified of spiders. This morning, just before the dawn chorus had even kicked in, our three-year-old crawled into bed beside me and tearfully told me there were naughty invisible spiders in the room. This has become a regular thing. His father and I talked the other night, wondering where it had come […]
You swear you have a handle on this. You’re not going to let a little setback send you crazy. Everyone has shit to deal with, right? Especially now, with the world going to hell in an especially rickety handcart, at full tilt. Just because it’s taking a few years to get over a virus doesn’t […]
Her body weighed far more than he had expected, its heft catching him off balance, so that he stumbled as he tried to undo the tight cord. His wellies got stuck in the mud and straw of the cowshed, as he muttered and cursed, taking the full force of her limp body with his bad […]
They are frightened. Wolf can smell the fear, like spilt beer and fag ends, sticky, wet and dead-ended, pressing against the walls of this small square room. All sharp corners and blinding tubes of light. Wolf can’t catch a breath, the air too chemical and long-dead. Two uniforms, one male, one female; hormones catch in […]
