Works

Ache Middler — aging rock musician in exile, ill of health — receives a letter from the woman he spent a night with twelve years ago. It’s the second time she’s writing, now as then about the daughter she had. The woman asks him to examine himself »inside and out.« In twenty letters to his unknown child, Ache describes proud dreams. Years of hunger. His recklessness. What happens if everything in life can become art? Is loneliness the price of independence? How do you grow old in a culture that celebrates youth and its exuberance?A novel about male longing and vulnerability, The Thin Gods takes us from an imaginary Alaska to downtown New York, from Thatcherite London and Berlin after 9/11 to a refugee camp on Europe’s south-eastern edge, and possibly to both hell and heaven. This is a story of nerves and electricity, and of a person set aflame
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»We wanted to make this Festschrift in the manner of Arisʼs own work: both complex and light, poetic and academic, with a contemporary feeling for absurdity and seriousness. We have also wished to make the book in the manner of a tree, with a variety of branches extending in different directions: to writer friends from the international scene, to research and teaching colleagues in Stockholm, as well as artists from various collaborations throughout the years.«
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It all began with an obituary notice in the newspaper. One day Aris Fioretos discovered that an archivist had passed away at an advanced age, leaving no immediate family. The name Iris Frost would not have stuck in his mind had it not been similar to one he had given a minor character in his first novel. Curiosity aroused, he contacted the newspaper and was given the number to the person who had put in the notice. When they met, truth proved stranger than fiction
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What would poetry be without the heavens? There is rarely verse without praise, exaltation, rapture. Inspiration and euphoria are prerequisites, striving to soar remains a given. Since its inception, poetry has seeked the proximity of bliss. Once described as »flights of fancy,« today rapture is rather referred to as a »high.« Seekers of beatitude seem to stop at little to achieve it. The mental meanderings of opium, cocaine’s kicks and the happy face of ecstasy are contemporary catalysts supplementing the muse’s kiss of old. Still the question remains: Where is poetry when it is »far out«? Is there a language for being out of control? And do they truly exist, those artifical paradises?
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Early twentieth-century Germany. Against all the odds, Nelly Becker has realized her dream: to become the country’s first female pilot. She and her French husband live for aerial highs, among hangars and whiffs of gasoline, until World War One and a failing heart puts an end to it all. If she continues to fly, Nelly will fall from the sky
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Werner Hamacher had an aversion against ending too soon
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»Mary, who comes from a rightwing family she has managed to turn her back on, soon realizes there is only one way to survive under these dire circumstances: she must keep mum. Being pregnant, she cannot fight back physically: violence will only be met with worse violence, which may endanger “the tiny sun” she is carrying in her womb. Yet silence poses a problem. The longer she is in custody, the more obvious it will become that she is pregnant.«
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Attention, abode, line of beauty, jellyfish, eyes, jolts, palms, finitude … By way of a series of desiderata — or »wished-for matter« —Aris Fioretos asks what the art of prose can amount to in times when diversity and transgression are celebrated, but people without papers are still undesired. Can a text offer respite? How is movement created through words? What do omissions have to do with writing, what role does pain play? And what is needed for Medusa’s throat to become the well of literature?
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Mary P. is 23 years old and an architecture student in a country run by the military. Her boyfriend is a political activist and is planning a revolt. One November night in 1973 Mary is arrested for subversive activities. For thirteen days and nights she is held at the notorious headquarters of the security services, the place with Heaven and Minus Two. After that, only one question remains: who decides about a life? Aris Fioretos’ new novel is a tale of passion about a young person’s yearning for freedom, a story of political violence and women’s solidarity. But above all it is about a body – its pain and desire, its yearning and its most secret transformations
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This richly illustrated biography is the first book in English to chronicle the life of Nelly Sachs (1891–1970), recipient of the 1966 Nobel Prize in Literature. The book follows Sachs from her secluded years in Berlin as the only child of assimilated German Jews, through her last-minute flight from the Nazis in 1940, to her exile in “peaceful Sweden” — a time of poverty and isolation, but also of growing fame. Enriched by over 300 images of Sachs’s manuscripts, photographs, and possessions, Nelly Sachs, Flight and Metamorphosisnot only offers detailed insights into the contexts of Sachs’s formation as a writer, but also looks at themes of trauma and testimony in her central works
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It is said that you emerged at the heart of Europe, that you are an invention of the old continent in the same way as democracy or the smallpox vaccine, or for that matter the thumbscrew and biometrics, that your origins are the medieval romance but that you, since newspapers began serialising you, have appeared in most conceivable guises, from family sagas replete with sabre-rattling and samovars to recluses who stuff their mouth full of stones by some godforsaken shore, though personally I dream of you as water, limitless yet ductile and containable, just as often dirty spume as aphrodisiacal slop, because I believe you can assume most forms without being lost, which is to say that you contain multitudes, like water in water . .
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Over a period of nearly twenty years, Aris Fioretos and Durs Grünbein have arranged meetings with each other — in the television tower at Alexanderplatz on one occasion, among the sand dunes of the Mojave Desert on another. In this book they salvage the remnants of those meetings. Five rambling conversations, in which they ponder dogs’ games with bones and the value of money, but also get drunk in a deserted New York and dream of flying fish while on the ferry to Drottningholm. Every now and then they even show their hand, exchanging memories from their earliest encounter with letters — the beginning of the great literary adventure
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It happens all the time. A parent dies. A child mourns. But how often does this particular person die? And how does one reciprocate something of what he gave?Aris Fioretos’ new book is both elegy and requiem in reverse. In short prose tableaux, as matter of fact as they are lyrical, Half the sun traces the adventures of an expatriate Greek — from his death in a Swedish home for the elderly, over the years in the burgeoning welfare state and back to the time before his first child. Now the father is no longer father. But has life before him
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Paul Celan (1920–1970) is and will surely remain the most important German-language poet after the second world war, after the Shoah. Unlike Ausgewählte Gedichte, which was published in the same year that Celan died, forty years ago, this new selection has had access to to the wealth of material available in Suhrkamp Verlag’s two great editions of Celan’s œuvre. They close a gap in Bibliothek Suhrkamp’s great collection of volumes of poetry by writers of modern classics
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The Great Anonymous, a selection of previously unknown, partially autobiographical texts written between Nelly Sachs’s arrival in Sweden and the Nobel Prize in 1966, casts a new light on the writer and her œuvre. Sachs’ mental health deteriorated with age, yet it was in exile in Sweden that she found her poetic voice. Since then her words have not ceased speaking aus dem Schweigen, »from silence«
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This edition of Nelly Sachs’ collected works contains, in addition to her complete poetics, rare prose works and many dramatic poems, including the unpublished plays from the 1960s. The fact of its publication places the exiled Sachs’ œuvre, outwardly as well, where it has always deserved to belong: at the heart of twentieth-century German literature
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The front teeth were those of a predator. At first their setting was a damp cave of just a few centimetres. Back then there was only a lump of flesh there, which sat upon ineffable treasures like the dragon in the fairytale, entrenched behind a bulwark of milk-coloured dentine. If the creature wanted to amuse or deceive, it wiped its tip across the balustrade; if it felt fear or rage, it withdrew itself, tip aquiver
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Meet Yannis Georgiadis – beaming, muscular and with a Robert Mitchum dimple in his chin. One winter’s day in 1967 he steps into the surgical ward in Kristianstad, and ends up staying in Sweden. We meet him as flat-footed son and dreamy shepherd, as worker, husband and father, but also as motorist on the E70 outside Zagreb one leaden afternoon in November. He plays croquet like a (demi) god and knows nearly everything about water in its various forms
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For over thirty years, Werner Hamacher has devoted himself to forms and possibilities of thought in and between literature, aesthetics, and philosophy. He has turned his attention to both the Enlightenment and Modernity. In pathbreaking essays on Hegel, Schlegel, and Heidegger, Hölderlin, Kleist, and Celan, in studies devoted to money, the general strike, and the color blue, he has demonstrated — always surprisingly and differently — that understanding, too, needs to be understood
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In The Width of a Foot, Aris Fioretos gathers texts written in the course of the last quarter century. The volume contains biographical sketches, but also poems and aphorisms, essays and pamphlets.The texts scrutinze world literature from Heraclitus to Winnie the Pooh, by way of Nelly Sachs, Nabokov, and Charlie Chaplin. Anatomical field studies are juxtaposed with ruminations on libraries, chatterboxes, and couches. And over all that sun shines which has the width of a human foot
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