Writers are first and foremost readers, especially when they start writing, as J.M. Coetzee says. It is not only influence and example that are important, but rather an indefinable "gut feeling" with which linguistic, factual and cultural neighbourhoods of writing emerge, as inclination, desire and not infrequently obsession. The literary experience that is influential for the present text sometimes presents itself, as Jeffrey Eugenides suggests, as the ghostwriting of an understanding literary past, e.g. that of Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett or Thomas Bernhard. But a sphere of neighbourliness and intertextual understanding also reinforces contemporary writing, its sense of reality, its poetic power and its order of thought. The literary ones are creative in rewriting and overwriting: in a kind of architecture of productive encounter and negotiation with the predecessors and models. With original contributions by Brigitte Kronauer, Reinhard Jirgl, Lutz Seiler, Colm Toibin and Vladimir Sorokin, commented by Lothar Mu¿ller and Klaus Scherpe, pictorial presentation of Max Wechsler's "material neighbourhoods" by Elisabeth Wagner.