Works Books

A biological thriller set in the steamy underworlds of Weimar Berlin, The Truth about Sascha Knisch deals with the so-called ‘sexual question’, its lures and seductiveness, dangers and temptations, but also with the shrewd love between two young people in a Germany at the brink of disaster. Above all, the novel is a declaration of love to imagination — clever, droll and stylish, couched in the form of a riddle and written with effortless elan by one of Europe’s most exciting and entertaining new writers
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Few phenomena raise such irritating questions concerning aesthetic experience and cultural perception as color. Whether understood historically or symbolically, ideologically or physiologically, color is one of the rare categories to be properly trans-disciplinary in character. We speak about color in both a painting and a symphony, a piece of text and a film. But how may color in the visual arts be related to, indeed translated into, color in the fields of — let’s say — literature or music? By which means do contemporary artistic practices investigate, but also destabilize, habits and frameworks that govern the perception and presentation of color in a given time or place? Which are the cultural ramifications of the specific medium in which color appear? And what, pray, is chromophobia?
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Towards the end of the last millennium, KF confessed that she often thought of beheadings. From the other side of the Atlantic, AF sent her a copy of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Invitation to a Beheading. Thereafter, a conversation ensued between the  old and  the new continent that was taken up again with irregular intervals in the course of the next years — always a little more awkwardly, always a little less self-evidently, until AF moved back to Sweden and the tête-à-tête lost its direction entirely. Probably, both writers were relieved by the interruption, even though the topic of discussion did not leave their thoughts. Thus it happened that, one day, when they had recuperated enough courage, they decided to write one last rejoinder each. It was a matter of making common cause in order to have the worries leave the world once and for all. They have termed their collaboration The Skulls
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Stockholm noir is a biological thriller, a dark tale about the wonders of the brain and the soul’s errant nature. But it is also a lyrical portrait of a city that marks its inhabitants in ways both puzzling and marvelous
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Written in the context of a rejuvenated interest in the work of Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843), the essay gathered in The Solid Letter offer the first consolidated attempt in English to set out the many facets of his oeuvre. Addressed not only to specialists in German studies but also to readers interested in modern poetry, philosophy, and aesthetics, the volume is wide in scope but succinct in nature, aiming to assert the relevance of Hölderlin for thinking about history, culture, and language today
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Generally considered the least lively and most bleak of casts, gray is the taint of vagueness and uncertainty. Marking the threshold region where luminous life seems suspended but death has not yet darkened the horizon, gray belongs to an evasive and evanescent world, carrying the tint of smoke, fog, ashes, and dust. As the ambiguous space of thought and remembrance where things blend and blur, it measures the difference between distance and proximity, shading into tinges of hesitation, hues of taciturnity, tones of time past and lost. Thus gray may also be the spectral medium of literature itself— that grainy gas of language
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Shadows, specters, and mirror spooks, figures of fume, fog, and fuddle, poltergeists, phantasms, djinns, and ether revenants . . . The apparitions of the spectral are multifarious. Containing reflections on phantoms in works of art, literature, and film, A Book about Phantoms discusses eighteenth-century technological inventions such as the phantasmagoria and phantom image, as well as developments within criminology and communications theory. It investigates the realm between life and death, word and image, and treats not only different forms of medial apparition, but also the premises and aporias of mediation as such. This is an essay singular in tone and unusual in substance, sedulously registering the odd moments when thoughts gain shape and bodies dissolve
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The crucial role of Paul Celan in postwar literature is widely recognized among European scholars, but has been addressed only scarcely in the Anglo-American academy. In Word Traces, Aris Fioretos attempts to redress that imbalance, bringing together thirteen expert readers in the most extensive English-language critical collection on Celan yet published
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The Critical Moment goes straight to the core of today’s concerns within the field of literary criticism. The study treats important problems at the intersection of literary history and aesthetic ideology, and its treatment of some of the most important writers of the  modernist canon offers new insights of great value to both the specialist and the  general reader
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In 1988, the friend of the author was killed in a traffic accident caused by a drunk driver. Written in the aftermath, The Book of Imparting attempts to circumscribe the absence left behind by the beloved
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