The Truth About Sascha Knisch

This elegant, hilarious novel, a biological thriller set in the steamy underworld of Weimar Berlin, deals with the lures and dangers of sex, and the passion between two young people. Clever, droll and stylish, the novel is couched in the form of a riddle. From the Hardcover edition.

Fioretos, Aris

Literature & Fiction

Vintage Books

This elegant, hilarious novel, a biological thriller set in the steamy underworld of Weimar Berlin, deals with the lures and dangers of sex, and the passion between two young people. Clever, droll and stylish, the novel is couched in the form of a riddle.

JONATHAN CAPE.

The Gray Book (Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics)

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, it 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, gray measures the difference between distance and proximity, shading into tinges of hesitation, hues of taciturnity, tones of time past and lost. Thus it may also be the spectral medium of literature itself―that grainy gas of language. Written with a lead pencil akin to those found in Nabokov, Rilke, Svevo, Poe, and Dickinson, The Gray Book chronicles the vicissitudes of such equivocal articulation―registering the graphite traces it leaves behind but also recording the dwindling span of its life. The book situates itself in a region beyond criticism but this side of literature, characterized by forgetting and finitude, and investigating important yet seemingly inaccessible "gray areas" in texts as old as those of Homer, and as recent as those of Beckett. Loosely arranging these literary finds according to a revision of the four elements, The Gray Book distances itself from tradition and treats not water but tears, not fire but vapor, not earth but grain, not air but clouds. The narrative thus construed, proceeding in the meandering movements of volatile thought rather than in the prudent steps of a treatise, appears gradually affected by its subject. Themes and facts previously confined to the realm of quoted texts leak into the narrative itself. The border between fiction and fact slowly dissolves as the book approaches the curious void that the author locates at the heart of "gray literature." Shaped by an omnipresent though increasingly unreliable narrator, The Gray Book may thus ultimately yield a poetics cast in the form of a ghost story.

History & Criticism

Stanford University Press

Nelly Sachs, Flight and Metamorphosis: An Illustrated Biography

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, Flight and Metamorphosis not 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.Aris Fioretos draws upon many previously unknown manuscripts, documents, medical records, and photos to produce the first reliably detailed narratives of Sachs's foundational experiences: her teenage years when she experienced the unrequited love later designated as the source for her entire oeuvre; her involvement with the Jewish Cultural League—seven years marked by mounting terror but also by her first public recognition as a writer; and her exposure to the radical Modernism of Swedish poetry in the 1940s. The book further describes the years of public recognition, addresses the paranoia that marked Sachs's final decade, and scrutinizes her close but complicated friendship with Paul Celan. An interview with Sachs's dear friend Margaretha Holmqvist provides touching insights into both her life in the 1960s and the events leading up to the Nobel Prize. Throughout, the book emphasizes the singularity of Sachs's accomplishments as a writer and the exemplarity of her existential situation—as a woman, as an exile, and—as she herself said—"a battleground."

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

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, Flight and Metamorphosis not 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. Aris Fioretos draws upon many previously unknown manuscripts, documents, medical records, and photos to produce the first reliably detailed narratives of Sachs's foundational experiences: her teenage years when she experienced the unrequited love later designated as the source for her entire oeuvre; her involvement with the Jewish Cultural League―seven years marked by mounting terror but also by her first public recognition as a writer; and her exposure to the radical Modernism of Swedish poetry in the 1940s. The book further describes the years of public recognition, addresses the paranoia that marked Sachs's final decade, and scrutinizes her close but complicated friendship with Paul Celan. An interview with Sachs's dear friend Margaretha Holmqvist provides touching insights into both her life in the 1960s and the events leading up to the Nobel Prize. Throughout, the book emphasizes the singularity of Sachs's accomplishments as a writer and the exemplarity of her existential situation―as a woman, as an exile, and―as she herself said―"a battleground."

This elegant, hilarious novel, a biological thriller set in the steamy underworld of Weimar Berlin, deals with the lures and dangers of sex, and the passion between two young people. Clever, droll and stylish, the novel is couched in the form of a riddle. From the Hardcover edition.

Contemporary

Overlook/Rookery

Le dernier Grec

Literary

Actes-sud

Die Seelensucherin.

DUMONT Literatur und Kunst Verlag

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Books by Fioretos, Aris

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Fioretos, Aris. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Truth About Sascha Knisch

The Truth About Sascha Knisch

The Gray Book (Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics)

The Gray Book (Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics)

Nelly Sachs, Flight and Metamorphosis: An Illustrated Biography

Nelly Sachs, Flight and Metamorphosis: An Illustrated Biography

The Truth About Sascha Knisch

Le dernier Grec

Die Seelensucherin.