Fiction. In FIRSTS, Thomas Crowe writes in the long-standing German literary genre of the Bildungsroman (education through experience). In this linked-stories, coming-of-age book of auto-biographical fiction, we see and hear echoes of great writers in this tradition, such as Goethe, Joyce, Novalis, Dickens and Thomas Mann. Crowe's "girls" are what has formed him, and we follow him from place to place, room to room in these sensitive and engaging love stories, all of which have an unusual and unique twist.