Sold to Sweden: Clemens Meyer’s DARK SATELLITES
ellerströms Förlag will be publishing Clemens Meyer’s DARK SATELLITES (S. Fischer 2017) which – upon publication – received amazing press not only in Germany but also in English translation at Fitzcarraldo!
»Figures from society’s margins are at the centre of the stories… Dark Satellites throws a perceptive light on circumscribed lives on the edges of Europe.« David Mills, The Sunday Times
»Meyer’s multifaceted prose, studded with allusions to both high and popular culture, and superbly translated by Katy Derbyshire, is musical and often lyrical, elevating lowbrow punning and porn-speak into literary devices… [Bricks and Mortar] is admirably ambitious and in many places brilliant – a book that not only adapts an arsenal of modernist techniques for the twenty-first century but, more importantly, reveals their enduring poetic potential.« Anna Katharina Schaffner, Times Literary Supplement
»A journey to the end of the night for 20/21st century Germany. Meyer reworks Döblin and Céline into a modern epic prose film with endless tracking shots of the gash of urban life, bought flesh and the financial transaction (the business of sex); memory as unspooling corrupted tape; journeys as migrations, as random as history and its splittings. A shimmering cast threatens to fly from the page, leaving only a revenant’s dream – sky, weather, lights-on-nobody-home, buried bodies, night rain. What new prose should be and rarely is; Meyer rewrites the rules to produce a great hallucinatory channel-surfer of a novel.« Chris Petit, author of Robinson
»The point of Im Stein [Bricks and Mortar] is that nothing’s “in stone”: Clemens Meyer’s novel reads like a shifty, corrupted collocation of .docs, lifted off the laptop of a master genre-ist and self-reviser. It’s required reading for fans of the Great Wolfgangs (Hilbig and Koeppen), and anyone interested in casual gunplay, drug use, or sex.« Joshua Cohen, author of Book of Numbers
»This is a wonderfully insightful, frank, exciting and heart-breaking read. Bricks and Mortar is like diving into a Force 10 gale of reality, full of strange voices, terrible events and a vision of neoliberal capitalism that is chillingly accurate.« A. L. Kennedy, author of Serious Sweet
Stories from the night. Clemens Meyer is a master of the short story. A train driver who loves the night journeys until a laughing man stands on the rails. A security guard who makes his rounds around the hostel for foreigners and falls in love with the woman behind the fence. A snack-bar owner who stands at the high-rise window and looks out at the glowing satellites of the night. Clemens Meyer writes stories from our time. He tells of lost battles and overwhelming desires with sovereignty, intoxication and somnambulistic certainty.
by the author of WHEN WE WERE DREAMING (S. Fischer 2006) and BRICKS AND MORTAR (S. Fischer 2013), which was shortlisted for the German Book Prize and longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2017