Amorbach, in the farthest corner of Odenwald, in front of the "Hotel zur Post", where Theodor W. Adorno used to spend his summers: This is where the novelist Thomas Meinecke and his characters gather for research purposes. Amorbach, it quickly becomes clear, is also "Adornobach", the exiled philosopher's dream place (where he often dreamt himself to, even from the Pacific coast). The Odenwald is not without influence on the research of the novel's characters; it is both an "Oden-wald" and a fairytale wood, a dark German forest in which, alongside fairytale characters, loggers dispossessed by the ruling prince appear as robbers. Some of them were shipped to Texas as early as the 19th century, so the Wild West also informs Thomas Meinecke's new novel.

Thomas Meinecke was born in Hamburg in 1955 and currently lives near Munich and in Marseille. He is a writer, who published numerous novels and short stories since 1986 by Suhrkamp Verlag (currently "Odenwald" 2024), a musician with his band F.S.K., founded in 1980, whose albums have been released on Daniel Richter's Buback label since 2008 (currently "Topsy Turvy" 2023); many collaborative electronic projects with Move D. since 1998, radio DJ (own show on Bayerischer Rundfunk from 1985 to 2021), and also a DJ in urban nightclubs (Berghain, Robert Johnson, Pudel Club, Rote Sonne, etc.). From 2007 until the first lockdown in 2020, he ran the event series "Plattenspieler" at the Theater Hebbel am Ufer, Berlin. Since fall 2022, the series has continued at the Berliner Volksbühne. In the winter semester of 2011/12, he held the "Poetikvorlesung" (poetry lecture series) at Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main ("I as Text," edition suhrkamp, ​​2012). He has held residencies at universities in Europe and the USA. Most recently, he was Writer in Residence at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland, and held a poetry lectureship on gender at the TU Braunschweig. He has received numerous awards, including the Berlin Literature Prize in 2020 (with a guest professorship at the FU in the summer semester of 2022). A "Text + Kritik" volume on Thomas Meinecke was published in 2021, and the poetological reader "Ozeanisch Schreiben" (published by Verbrecher Verlag) in 2022.

Funded by the Cultural Office of the City of Frankfurt am Main.