This is a "best of" of a creative writing course at Heidelberg University which has been running for about 20 years now. So the stories offer a wide range of topics, style and content. So don't expect a unifying theme here. The remarkable thing is that although mostly written by amateurs, there is nothing amateurish about the stories. The stories are all good, some of them are excellent, first and foremost Alex Flory's "Sangria" which is an absolute masterpiece, one of the finest short stories I have ever read.