Ror Wolf
Raoul Tranchirer’s Encyclopaedia for Intrepid Readers in Three Volumes
Vol. II
fiction
Edited by Thomas Schröder
488pp, with numerous illustrations
Advice, explanations and comments for the most diverse occasions in worlds above and below, listed alphabetically, and including entries on apple swindles, rubber men, bang silver, life shortening remedies, patent nutcrackers, Rossmässler’s works, swing machines, relationships of curvature and listener duties. Because: »Not only the body should rest, the mind too must be protected from all excitement and disturbance« (Ror Wolf).
With 79 previously unpublished entries.
»Ror Wolf’s uplifting and rhythmic prose is discontinuous, fantastic and breathtakingly musical. Cinematic almost, his love for jazz, film and slapstick, for Buster Keaton and Laurel & Hardy is always palpable.«
Faust Kultur
»Wolf’s texts are impeccably unacademic. There is no hidden philosophy, no professional wordplay, no scholarly wink with the eye. His experiences do not derive from a literary life, but from his findings in a literature of our everyday life, without longing glances on so-called sensuous full narratives.«
Brigitte Kronauer
»In his prose, his poetry and his word and sound collages Ror Wolf inimitably combines linguistic artistry and grotesque comedy with a terse and compassionate perception of reality and its fundamental constants, fear and hope, pleasure and decay. He is a master of the cryptic and utopian play with the primal matter of poetry.«
Friedrich Hölderlin Award, Jury statement
»Wolf’s worlds are often as unsettling as those collages Max Ernst assembled from elements at once familiar, arbitrary and terrifying. Rarely has the puzzling been so entertaining (…)«
Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung
»The ›world-explainer to the fearless‹ would have to explain (...) how it is that true knowledge of the world can be gained from a work of art which plays so slyly with marked reality cards as do the texts of Ror Wolf.«
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
»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
The Collected Works of Ror Wolf. The New Edition for the New Century
The annotated edition of Ror Wolf not only brings together all previously published books by Ror Wolf, but also work which appeared in out-of-the-way places or was not printed at all. It includes early drafts as well as manuscript versions and for the first time makes accessible a broad selection of essays, reviews, speeches and correspondence. An afterword by the editor describes the genesis and reception of the individual works.
Reviews
»Pure joy. (...) There’s no explanation yet as to why this mixture of ›excitement and scare, lust for realism, importance and concision‹, of eloquence, humour and horror moves and exhilarates readers like it does, what makes for its strong pull. An enigmatic work, yet suitbale for daily use.«
Frankfurter Rundschau (launch of the Collected Works)
»In over forty years, Ror Wolf has created an opus that is singular in its powerful visual intricateness, its wild, chilly humour, and its magical simulation of reality. He is a classic of postmodern literature, he has been for quite a while.«
Süddeutsche Zeitung
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