Thomas Raab

For nearly two decades, Thomas Raab has been traveling through Austria with his crime novels (the Metzger series, the Huber series, STILL), taking to the stage, flipping open his books – and finding himself reading less and less. Because the in-between is simply so much more fun. The free storytelling. The tale-spinning. The digressions. The shared laughter. The direct exchange with the audience.

Finally, Raab fulfills his long-held wish to make exactly that the conceptual core of an evening. A literary-cabaret solo format beyond the classic author reading. The idea: "Reading Failures - and Other Embarrassments."

A successful writer sits on stage, his books beside him – and he grandly fails to read from them. Instead, he shares behind-the-scenes stories: about writing and failing, about cut passages, particularly disastrous published sentences, outrageous spelling mistakes... About embarrassing moments that never made it into the book. About readings where everything went wrong, about the absurdities of the literary world. About his time as a teacher at a Vienna high school – and what a math or gym class sometimes has in common with a reading... and much more.

"Reading Failures" is not a classic reading and not a cabaret with a barrage of gags, but a personal, very funny evening that blends literature, storytelling, and self-revelation. An evening about the life of an author who never actually wanted to be one and who has nonetheless been on the road for 18 years – with more stories in tow than can fit into books.