Josef Winkler, who grew up in a Carinthian village inhabited by Catholic angels and devils, where there were no books, describes in "The Outbursts of Angels" the early days of his struggle for language and imagery. After his mother once said, "We have no money for books!", he began to steal money. First from his mother, for Karl May books and films, which is recounted in the first part "Winnetou, Abel and Me." Later, he stole from his father to buy books by Camus, Hemingway, Sartre, Peter Weiss, and Jean Genet. He traveled to Paris with a painter friend to see the expressive works of the Russian-Jewish painter Chaim Soutine, and in the second part "To Speak of Reality as if It Were Nevertheless Not There," he tells of Soutine's life, the childhood and youth of the poet and thief Jean Genet - but above all about the transformative power of great literature.