About this item
Highlights
- An abandoned construction site.
- Author(s): Wolfgang Hilbig
- 172 Pages
- Fiction + Literature Genres,
Description
About the Book
"In these early prose writings, Wolfgang Hilbig (1941-2007) summons menacing visions of smoldering factory pits, rampant nature, and split identities"--Book Synopsis
An abandoned construction site. Glowering pits and furnaces. A lone man in a bungalow. Widely considered to be one of the great German writers of the twentieth century, Wolfgang Hilbig's dark visions have long held readers aloft with their musical language and uncompromising vision of the modern world. In Under the Neomoon, his debut short story collection originally published in East Germany in 1982, Hilbig's persistent fixations--factory pits, rampant nature, and split identities--are at their most visceral and brilliant. Rendered into English by Hilbig's longtime translator Isabel Fargo Cole, these short tales apply fluorescent language ("garlands of cast-iron flowers," "tall dark-green water grasses") to lives and spaces of foreclosed dreams. An electric collection that evokes the works of Andrei Tarkovsky and Ingeborg Bachmann, Under the Neomoon is a neon-bright reminder of humanity's folly and the importance of storytelling from down below, where the workers toil.Review Quotes
"Hilbig's stories are part working-class memoir and part gothic fiction, lyrical and unsettling, verging at times on Lovecraftian pulp horror--a genre, alongside American Westerns, that he eagerly consumed in his youth. The stories in Under the Neomoon, which range from two-page flash pieces to a nearly novella-length work, showcase both ends of this genre spectrum."
--Los Angeles Review of Books
"Work and nature wrestle everywhere in these stories...the simplest turns of phrase delight" --Kirkus Reviews "Radiant...Hilbig's bold lyricism stands out, as does his textured portrait of an artist's disillusionment with East German communism. It's a valuable time capsule."
--Publishers Weekly
Praise for Wolfgang Hilbig
"Comic and terrifying and profound."
--Rachel Kushner, The Guardian (Best Books of 2021)
"Hilbig's was among the most significant prose and poetry written not just in the GDR but in all of postwar Germany--East or West."
--Joshua Cohen, author of The Netanyahus
"-Evokes the luminous prose of W.G. Sebald."
--The New York Times
"[Hilbig writes as] Edgar Allan Poe could have written if he had been born in Communist East Germany."
--Los Angeles Review of Books
"Wolfgang Hilbig is an artist of immense stature."
--László Krasznahorkai, author of Satantango