A German Picturesque: Selected and Introduced by Ben Marcus

Haunting in their tone, brilliant in their images–very like fantastic presences moving across glass–the twenty-one fictions in this startling debut collection seem both inexplicably familiar and like no writing we have seen before. The opening story leads us through a kaleidoscopic series of thoughts and memories around the act of writing a letter. Another, an intricately structured document of documents–household inventories, daily calendars, property deeds, an announcement–suggests the reality overflowing these mundane markers of our lives. Yet another traces the histories of five artifacts, while at the same time slyly assembling five miniature biographical portraits.