About the Author

Christian Kracht is a Swiss novelist whose books have been translated into twenty-seven languages. His previous novel, Imperium, was the recipient of the 2012 Wilhelm Raabe Literature Prize.

Daniel Bowles teaches German studies at Boston College. His previous translations include novels by Thomas Meinecke and short texts by Alexander Kluge and Rainald Goetz.

Reviews

Across [The Dead], Kracht leaves clues and tracks (perhaps traps) for the readers to connect (or tumble into), eschewing certainty through deliciously stimulating ambiguity in a remarkable, elegiac, sensual, often grotesque and hilarious novel. a remarkable, elegiac, sensual, often grotesque and hilarious novel. --Jan Wilm, The Los Angeles Review of Books The Dead reads like a reboot of J. G. Ballard's Crash, in a treatment by Wes Anderson, after a weekend spent binge-watching John Schlesinger's version of The Day of the Locust. The result draws out a comically bleak but shakily ambiguous vision of the coming image-world of fascist politics and Tinseltown productions, and of how both authorized a new power of the screen in startlingly effective ways. --Eric Banks, Bookforum [Christian] Kracht is one of the pre-eminent German-language authors of the last twenty years . . . Like any stylist, he courts his own readership and creates his own genre. And still, there is joy [in The Dead] for everyone, prose that astonishes, personal tragedies that mar the heart, and set pieces of outstanding oddness. When one is reading Kracht, one is nowhere else. --J.W. McCormack, Longreads Like Cabaret, Christian Kracht's novel The Dead . . . evokes a brightly colored burlesque Weimar period . . . balance[d] precariously between real and unreal. --Lidija Haas, Harper's Magazine Excellent ... some inspired moments and images. --Publishers Weekly