"Hunger and Silk" contains Herta Müller's essays from the years 1990 to 1995, covering the collapse of socialism and the emergence of new ephemeral utopias: "If utopias, while being conceived and written down, had to laugh, eat, walk, or sleep in a single person for even a moment from one sentence to the next, there would be none." Truth and lies, sincerity and deception, power and resistance in dictatorship are the major themes of the Nobel Prize-winning author. "A sentence by Herta Müller can replace a novel" - the words of Verena Auffermann also characterize the power of these essays.