Wolfgang Hilbig Book order

Exploring themes of lust, spirituality, and the complexities of modern existence, this work delves into the author's struggles with statelessness, addiction, and capitalism. It draws on the literary traditions of notable figures like Heinrich Böll and Imre Kértesz, offering a profound reflection on the writer's role in a world filled with deception. The narrative's digressive style invites readers to engage deeply with its multifaceted commentary on life in postwar Germany and the broader human experience.

From award-winning author-and-translator combination Wolfgang Hilbig and Isabel Fargo Cole What can an irascible East German tell us about how society shapes relations between the sexes? A lot it turns out. Acclaimed as one of Wolfgang Hilbig's major works, The Females finds the lauded author focusing his labyrinthine, mercurial mind on how unequal societies can pervert sexuality and destroy a healthy, productive understanding of gender. It begins with a factory laborer who ogles women in secret on the job. When those same women mysteriously vanish from their small town, the worker sets out on a hallucinatory journey to find them. Powerful and at times disturbing, The Females leaves us with some of the most challenging, radical, and enduring insights of any novel from the GDR.

"Where once was a beautiful wood now stands a desolate field smothered in ash and garbage, and here a young man named Waller has terrorizing encounters with grotesque figures named "the garbagemen." As Waller becomes fascinated with these desperate men who eke out a survival by rooting through their nation's waste, he imagines they are also digging through its past as their government erases its history and walls itself off from the outside world. One of celebrated East German author Wolfgang Hilbig's most accessible and resonant works, The Tidings of the Trees is about the politics that rip us apart, the stories we tell for survival, and the absolute importance of words to nations and people. Featuring some of Hilbig's most striking, poetic, and powerful images, this flawless novella perfectly balances politics and literature."--Amazon.com

"It starts when a young boy becomes obsessed with an empty and decayed coal plant, coming to believe that it is tied to mysterious disappearances throughout the countryside. But as a young man, with the building now turned into an abattoir processing dead animals, he revisits this place and his memories of it, realizing just how much he has missed."--Page 4 of cover.

Doppelgängers, a murderer's guilt, pulp noir, fanatical police, and impossible romances--these are the pieces from which German master Wolfgang Hilbig builds a divided nation battling its demons. Delving deep into the psyches of both East and West Germany, The Sleep of the Righteous reveals a powerful, apocalyptic account of the century-defining nation's trajectory from 1945 to 1989. From a youth in a war-scarred industrial town to wearying labor as a factory stoker, surreal confrontations with the Stasi, and, finally, a conflicted escape to the West, Hilbig creates a cipher that is at once himself and so many of his fellow Germans. Evoking the eerie bleakness of films like Tarkovsky's Stalker and The Lives of Others, this titan of German letters combines the Romanticism of Poe with the absurdity of Kafka to create a visionary, somber statement on the ravages of history and the promises of the future.

First published in German as > by Wolfgang Hilbig, c1993, S. Fischer Verlag GmbH, Frankfurt am Main.--Title page verso.