Friedrich Hölderlin Award

Ror Wolf – Two or Three Years Later: Forty-nine Digressions

fiction

200pp (36,200 words)

» About the author

English sample translation (pdf)

Celebrating the unconventional element in literature and an author who has long enjoyed cult status!

»Seldom in German literature has the seemingly solid ground of traditional narrative been so earthshakingly shattered.«
Rolf Michaelis, Die Zeit

»The texts of Ror Wolf stand without comparison. He is capable of revealing the comical, the absurd element, the abysmal behind our everyday. His work stands as living proof that ‚serious’ literature may also be hilarious and entertaining.«
Horst Köhler, former Federal President of Germany

»Sometimes the whole universe seems to have been drawn into the elongations and contractions of a gigantic metabolic system that turns the identifiable fragments of reality upside down. Catastrophes, accidents, sodomy – anything that we perceive as singular and prominent incidents standing out from our everyday life - appear in Wolf's texts in abundance, as though they had been bought by the hundred at the discounter and been dumped from the package to the floor.
A fantastic spectacle! It is exactly this fantastic accumulation of events which makes the texts so exclusive and entrancing. The truth of form manifests itself in immense clusters and their reciprocal relativization. In fact, these accumulations have been dominant for a long time in almost all areas of Western society, publicly and privately: in the supermarkets and in the news, in the disaster statistics and capital markets, even in love and death.«
Die Welt

Rights sold

USA (English World) - University of Rochester/Open Letter Books

audio book - parlando

» Contact

Reviews

»Literature is first and foremost made from language, rather than from thoughts or stories. No other German poet has shown this as passionately and vividly as Ror Wolf has. Rightly so, he is praised and adored by critics, scholars and writers alike.«
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

»Ror Wolf does not settle for the conventional concepts of realism, time, space, or causality. Instead, he picks his bits and pieces from crime stories, love stories, adventure stories, assembling them anew though his melodious prose. The result is thoroughly magical.«
buchjournal

»He shakes and mixes language like Jandl or H.C. Artmann; like Handke and Jelinek, he experiments with bits and pieces, with everyday trivia.«
Saarbrücker Zeitung

»A bright view on everyday madness.«
Deutschlandradio

»Ror Wolf is (...) a great artist. Unlike the very famous writers of his generation, he refrains from composing edifying sermons, dramatic life stories, or even a political agenda, no, his texts are literature for literature’s sake, and they are exquisitely exhilarating.«
Berliner Zeitung

More titles by Ror Wolf