City with Houses

A city with deteriorating houses. A pristine house seemingly without inhabitants. Inhabitants of a world no longer human. In a remarkable collection of stories, Ernst-Wilhelm Handler conducts us into a world where nothing is quite as we know it, or quite what we might expect. In these stories, Handler creates a series of possible worlds, some resembling those we experience on an regular basis, some existing in startling opposition to everyday life. Among them: Eastern Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall; Austria during World War II; a dystopia of a dyslexic matriarchal society; and a world where states of affairs come into being through writing. Narrated by businessmen, a philosopher, a prostitute who has undergone a sex change, an old woman suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, and disembodied units of consciousness, these stories unfold through experiments of thought, language, and voice that illustrate, reflect on, and reconfigure the philosophical problems that shape and unsettle our lives. First published in German in 1995, City with Houses announced the arrival of a major talent and has since been followed by two related volumes. At home in many spheres - business dealings, academic abstractions, nitty-gritty romance, practical hells - Handler writes as a literary
outsider,
a businessman intimately familiar with contemporary philosophical and scientific movements. This unique perspective, whether applied to the activities of a broker, the paradoxes of a diarist, the sexual education of a history student, or post-apocalyptic children, shakes us from the slumber of our own houses - and wakes us to the realities, the possibilities, and the wonders of our day.