My name is Friederike Wunschik, but people I’ve met in person mostly call me Fritzi [like “Fritz” with a long “ee” sound at the end]. There’s a long-ish story to me and my name that I’ll be glad to tell anyone who wants to hear it.

I’m a certified translator for German, English, and Spanish.

I’ve got an M.A. in North American Studies from the University of Erlangen. My Master’s thesis is titled “The Representation of the Hispanic Other in North American Superhero Comic Books”.

Between being certified as a translator and going back to university I spent almost a year at Thieme Publishers in Stuttgart, working for the editorial staff as an intern. I really enjoyed my time there and I learnt a lot about the backstage process of putting a book together. Also, I got to do a lot of what I like best: reading.

What really motivates me, gets me excited, and can absorb lots of my time is learning about things, people, events, and ideas.

I think there is much to support the thesis that human reality is constantly being made and unmade. I find this process of making and unmaking interesting and worth scrutinizing. This explains my fascination with hybridity, discourse, and conflict theory.

What else?
Maybe a list of the books on my night-stand right now (updated April 2013)?

• Orientalism by Edward Said (the 25th Anniversary Edition) finished that. Will have to read it again. Especially liked the preface and afterwords.
• To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf abandoned this once more… I’ll try again later
• Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding was re-reading it and got distracted half-way through.
• Falsche Freunde a collection of poems by Uljana Wolf
• The Big Over Easy by Jasper Fforde was re-reading this until my copies of Unseen Academicals and I Shall Wear Midnight (both by Terry Pratchett) arrived and I read those instead.
• November 2011: Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon. Man, only 84 pages in (out of 1220 total) and already so much has happened! I think I like it, though I’m not very far in and I have abandoned it before…
• Delusions of Gender by Cordelia Fine
• The Woman Who Died A Lot by Jasper Fforde