Spring 2032: an enigmatic bandleader named Triboulet arrives by helicopter in Rome, where his troupe awaits with a legion of animals and unruly kids. When performing acrobatic feats and provoking states of joyous panic through their ritualistic music, the troupe's arrival proves restorative, for the world is beset with famines, plagues, and religious conflicts, which Triboulet seeks to neutralize with freeing laughter. While they begin constructing strange edifices in the city, sacred sites around the world suffer terrible, often humorous forms of vandalism, provoking the ire of religious and political authorities, who grow suspicious of the troupe and leery of the increasing allure they exert over people. Although radical Islamic sects claim responsibility for the attacks on Catholic and Jewish sites, no one is certain who is responsible-is it the Jihadists, anarcho-atheist intellectuals, or eco-terrorists? And who really is the masked Triboulet? The very future of the world is at stake, and while touring Jerusalem during Christmas, Triboulet and his merry troupe bear witness to the world's pivotal crossing into a new reality. Albert Camus noted that 'the metaphysics of the worst' expresses itself in a literature of damnation and argued that 'we have still not yet found the exit' from such literature. With his second novel, Hanshe has found the way out, offering in fact something not only promising, but astounding, a pathway that is into a new reality, into a 'physics of the best.' The Abdication is a true ero(t)icomic epic.

The Abdication

Reference

Hanshe, Rainer J.

Writing, Research & Publishing Guides

Contra Mundum Press

Shattering the Muses, Rainer J. Hanshe's third book, is a hybrid entity constructed of quotes, poetry, short essays, and visual art, including original works created expressly for the book by Italian artist Federico Gori. Fragmentary and elliptic, aphoristic & apothegmatic, Shattering the Muses explores, if not enacts, the eclipsing of the logos and creative force within individuals as well in the spheres of culture & civilization. Spanning a broad range of history, Shattering the Muses stages the fundamental chiasmic unity of creation and destruction as it occurs in individuals, whether a result of choice, tragic events, and/or social, religious, or political exigencies. It also enumerates the destruction of individual artworks, museums, and the various biblioclasms enacted by numerous cultures from biblical times till today. When do individuals and cultures rise out of catastrophe and destruction, and when do they descend into silence, either temporarily, or (possibly) permanently, and thus remain forever shattered If language or the creative force is a dwelling place, conversely, when it disintegrates, or is rendered inoperative, or when we as individuals or as a civilization are split from it -- this is the ultimate form of the Unheimlich, an extreme cataclysm out of which there is often no return. Hanshe proposes that "apocalypses" are not eschatological, but ontological, ever-present, continuous events that threaten us. Hope before disaster, creation in the midst of inevitable evaporation. Shattering the Muses is a paean to the book, a work of mourning and of threat, where the fragility of consciousness, of art as a positive power, is an ephemeral but stalwart citadel against barbarism.

Shattering the Muses

Literature & Fiction

Poetry

The Acolytes depicts the yearning of the young artist for success, acceptance, fulfillment. In this dark, searing tale of hope becoming obsession, admiration festering into entrapment, excitement bending into curse, Gabriel starts as a naïve young man full of dedication to high art and to the transformative powers of the imagination. In Amos, the renegade of American letters and cult figure, Gabriel thinks he has found his guiding star, but Ivan, the charismatic yet sinister theater director exerts a strange, mesmeric power over the author and his entire coterie. Terence, the unobtrusive moral fulcrum of the novel, and a cast of others are unable to escape from the welter of exploitation to which their lack of self-knowledge condemns them. Replete with horrors that rise to the grandeur of myth, The Acolytes is a novel like no other. -- "The Acolytes is an original and powerful visionary novel which introduces and explores territory-heroic idealism, its illusions and discontents-rarely touched on in American fiction. It addresses deep longings and aspirations that most artists have swept to the side, which is not only courageous, it could prove beneficial to our culture. Hanshe gives promise of becoming a truly important writer." -Daniel Blue -- The Acolytes "flies in the face of mainstream publishing with its eye on something bigger and vaster than the conventional marketplace. In mode its allegorical approach is so different than the types of Jonathan Franzen 'family sagas' that publishers pick up on nowadays. It's quirky, weird, and mannered and many of the scenes have the strange power of dreams. They proceed according to their own logic, stately as yachts, moving irrevocably, like Time. Like John Cowper Powys, Hanshe has the talent for making other species come to life." -Kevin Killian -- "The connection between the aesthetic and the religious realm in the term "acolyte" is important for Rainer J. Hanshe's novel as it subtly links his story of masters and disciples in the thespian and literary arts to the contemporary crisis in the Church. In the acolyte's realm the cults of art and religion converge. Hanshe's novel also illuminates, in beautiful and also horrifying ways, the many-nuanced nature of "love." In a deeply poetic subplot it shows the oneness of two beings in and with each other as an evocation of cosmic unity. The novel is a riveting, slightly surreal portrait of the bohemian underworld of New York and it exposes the sinister underside of the ever-beckoning dream of art. It shows with fascinating nuance the multi-faceted nature of artistic ambition, illuminating a range from lofty yearning to diabolical craving for power." -Walter H. Sokel

The Acolytes

Literary

EyeCorner Press

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