Yesterday would have been Grandma's hundredth birthday, but if she hadn't passed away back then, she wouldn't be alive today either. The stories by Markus Orths can be read as a wonderfully pointed homage to the tone and language of his region of origin, to the type of people there - and above all to his grandmother, her eloquence, and the originality of her oral storytelling. Yet they are much more than that: They are nothing less than a winking, literarily polished love letter to life itself, to its involuntary comedy and the grotesque blossoms it sometimes produces. With subtle undertones, a good dose of dark humor, full of quirky incidents and curious dialogues, and often balancing on the edge of absurdity: This is how the tales in this collection come across - providing an intellectually amusing reading pleasure.