including Rainald Goetz, Andreas Neumeister and Benjamin von Stuckrad-Barre. First published with the subtitle "Ernste Geschichten am Ende des Jahrtausends" ("Serious stories at the turn of the Millennium"), this subtitle was dropped in its 2001 republication by Deutsche Taschenbuch Verlag in favour of an "Avant-Pop-Reader". The relabeling notably coincided with the deflating currency of the term "pop literature" in the early years of the new century. Between September 2004 and June 2006 Kracht published the independent literary magazine Der Freund in collaboration with Eckhart Nickel. He initially lived in Kathmandu while working as the magazine's editor before leaving Nepal during a period of political unrest. The chiefly German-language magazine was ultimately completed in San Francisco with a total of eight editions as originally planned. The magazine featured regular contributions from Ira Cohen, Reinhold Messner, Ian Buruma, Stanislav Lem, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Rem Koolhaas, Momus, David Woodard and Eduardo Kac. February 2007 saw the publication of Metan (Methane), the product of a climbing expedition on Kilimanjaro with Ingo Niermann. The book posits that the effects of methane gas on the earth's atmosphere are part of a vast cosmic conspiracy. Early reviews varied from the critical to the bewildered, one describing it as "großer Quatsch" ("a load of nonsense"). Another reviewer refers to the book as a parody of "alarmism" and suggested it should be taken as a joke: "But if this book is taken as a joke, it probably is not a bad one". In 2012 Kracht published an exchange of letters with Woodard entitled Five Years. Although this text is essentially a performance piece, certain episodes in their correspondence were deemed controversial, especially references to Nueva Germania. Indeed, in February 2012, Georg Diez, writing an opinion piece published in Der Spiegel alleged that Five Years exposed racist, right-wing sympathies supposedly present in Kracht's latest novel Imperium. This view was widely contested and by established critics and authors alike during a sustained literary debate in German-language newspapers and magazines. Novels The protagonists of Kracht's fiction embark on journeys that take them in search of an elusive moment of immersive, utopian experience or spiritual enlightenment often located in a different nation or culture. Their journey usually, but not always, results in disappointment, failure or even death. The theme of travel was introduced in Kracht's debut novel Faserland (1995), a text that is often central in the discussion of German pop literature