Two women argue about a child. Both claim it is theirs. Bertolt Brecht wrote the story »Der Augsburger Kreidekreis« in 1940 when he was accused of high treason and had to flee Nazi Germany. He relocated the plot of the story, whose motif he had taken from Chinese, to the time of the Thirty Years' War and to his home town of Augsburg. Brecht dealt with the motif of the chalk circle rehearsal in several works. The most famous of these is the play »Der kaukasische Kreidekreis«, which premieres on 29 September in the Marguerre Hall.

Italy is the Guest of Honour at the Frankfurt Book Fair. That's why the October reading time features Italian literature. The actor Antonio Manzini has made a name for himself in his home country, but also in Germany, as a crime writer with stories about the unconventional investigator Rocco Schavione. In 2015, Manzini wrote »Spitzentitel«, a tragicomic satire about the literary world, translated into German by Antje Peter: A famous writer has finished a new novel, but his publishing house has since been swallowed up by a large corporation, and now changes suitable for the public are needed.