Hansjörg Schneider is a master of the short form. The Owl over the Rhine collates the most wonderful of his texts from the last 20 years: a homage to his chosen home of Basel appears alongside memories of his childhood in rural Aargau, together with observations of people and everyday scenes, texts about nature and jazz, about dialect as a secret language and the perils of technology, about actors, artists, the literati and his own writing.