Hi everyone, I’m back from a brief hiatus in which I read some good, weird books. One of them was a galley of the novel Gretel and the Great War by Adam Ehrlich Sachs—coming out from FSG this summer—that is set in 1919 Austria and composed of letters from a man in a sanatorium to a mute woman he claims is his daughter. I really enjoyed the novel, which feels a bit like Brothers Grimm meets Thomas Bernhard, and especially admired its tricky form. The novel consists of 26 bedtime stories the man writes that work individually as stories while also painting a larger portrait of pre-war Vienna and slowly telling the story of the man and the daughter.
Read Full Article »