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

Friedrich Hölderlin Award


Ror Wolf Werke

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

fiction

200pp (36,200 words)

English sample translation (pdf)

»Working in the traditions of Robert Walser, Robert Pinget, and Laurence Sterne, Ror Wolf creates strangely entertaining and condensed stories that call into question the very nature of what makes a story a story. Almost an anti-book, ZWEI ODER DREI JAHRE SPÄTER takes as its basis the small, diurnal details of life, transforming these oft-overlooked ordinary experiences of nondescript people in small German villages into artistic meditations on ambiguity, repetition, and narrative.
Incredibly funny and playful, ZWEI ODER DREI JAHRE SPÄTER is unlike anything else you’ve ever read – from German or any other language. These stories of men observing other men, of men who may or may not have been wearing a hat on a particular Monday (or was it Tuesday?), are delightful word-puzzles that are both intriguing and enjoyable.«
(Open Letter Books)

»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

Rights sold

US (English World) - Open Letter Books

Previously Published (rights reverted):
audio book - parlando

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Reviews

»Seldom in German literature has the seemingly solid ground of traditional narrative been so tenderly, 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

»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

»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.«
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

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Ror Wolf: Continuation of the ReportRor Wolf: December's Suddenly Creeping-In ColdRor Wolf: Hans Waldmann's AdventuresRor Wolf: In a State of Expanded CalmRor Wolf: News From the Inhabited WorldRor Wolf: Pfeifer’s TravelsRor Wolf: Pilzer and PelzerRor Wolf: Raoul Tranchirer's Observations on SilenceRor Wolf: Raoul Tranchirer’s Encyclopaedia for Intrepid Readers in Three VolumesRor Wolf: Raoul Tranchirer’s Notes from a Cut-Up LifeRor Wolf: The Advantages of DarknessRor Wolf: The Dangers of the Great PlainRor Wolf: The PoemsRor Wolf: The Various Consequences of the ImaginationRor Wolf: Various Ways of Losing One’s Peace of Mind