“A great Faustian fable, and a literary endeavor of historical ingenuity that we now may start to characterize as Krachtian.” ―Karl Ove Knausgaard In Berlin, Germany, in the early 1930s, the acclaimed Swiss film director Emil Nägeli receives the assignment of a lifetime: travel to Japan and make a film to establish the dominance of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi empire once and for all. But his handlers are unaware that Nägeli has colluded with the Jewish film critics to pursue an alternative objective―to create a monumental, modernist, allegorical spectacle to warn the world of the horror to come. 
Meanwhile, in Japan, the film minister Masahiko Amakasu intends to counter Hollywood’s growing influence and usher in a new golden age of Japanese cinema by exploiting his Swiss visitor. The arrival of Nägeli’s film-star fiancée and a strangely thuggish, pistol-packing Charlie Chaplin―as well as the first stirrings of the winds of war―soon complicates both Amakasu’s and Nägeli’s plans, forcing them to face their demons . . . and their doom.
"The Dead is the beautiful, brilliant, and utterly mad novel that Thomas Mann would have written had he known the East like Yukio Mishima and loved his adopted Hollywood with the gusto of Nathanael West." ―Joshua Cohen "The Dead is a story of love and sadness in times when the weak were broken by the unforgiving ideologies of fascism and National Socialism . . . I read The Dead twice in a row, first for the story and then for the beauty of the prose." ―Sjón

The Dead: A Novel

Literature & Fiction

KRACHT, CHRISTIAN

Literary

Farrar. Straus and Giroux

One of Publishers Weekly's Ten Best Books of 2015 One of Huffington Post's "18 Best Fiction Books of 2015" An outrageous, fantastical, uncategorizable novel of obsession, adventure, and coconuts In 1902, a radical vegetarian and nudist from Nuremberg named August Engelhardt set sail for what was then called the Bismarck Archipelago, in German New Guinea. His destination: the island Kabakon. His goal: to establish a colony based on worship of the sun and coconuts. His malnourished body was found on the beach on Kabakon in 1919; he was forty-three years old. Christian Kracht's Imperium uses the outlandish details of Engelhardt's life to craft a fable about the allure of extremism and its fundamental foolishness. Engelhardt is at once a pitiable, misunderstood outsider and a rigid ideologue, and his misguided notions of purity and his spiral into madness presage the horrors of the mid-twentieth century. Playing with the tropes of classic adventure tales such as Treasure Island and Robinson Crusoe, Kracht's novel, an international bestseller, is funny, bizarre, shocking, and poignant. His allusions are misleading, his historical time line is twisted, his narrator is unreliable--and the result is a novel that is a cabinet of mirrors, a maze pitted with trapdoors. Both a provocative satire and a serious meditation on the fragility and audacity of human activity, Imperium is impossible to categorize and utterly unlike anything you've read before.

Imperium: A Fiction of the South Seas

Reference

Winner of the Wilhelm Raabe Literature Prize One of Publishers Weekly's Ten Best Books of 2015 A Huffington Post Best Fiction Book of the Year In 1902, a radical vegetarian and nudist from Nuremberg named August Engelhardt set sail for what was then called the Bismarck Archipelago. His destination: the island of Kabakon. His goal: to establish a colony based on worship of the sun and coconuts. His malnourished body was found on the beach on Kabakon in 1919; he was forty-three years old.
In his first novel to be translated into English, internationally bestselling author Christian Kracht uses the outlandish details of Engelhardt’s life to craft a fable about the allure of extremism and its fundamental foolishness. “A Melvillean masterpiece of the South Seas” (Jonathan Sturgeon, Flavorwire), Imperium is funny, bizarre, shocking, and poignant---sometimes all on the same page.

Imperium

Humor & Satire

Picador Paper

“A great Faustian fable, and a literary endeavor of historical ingenuity that we now may start to characterize as Krachtian.” ―Karl Ove Knausgaard In Berlin, Germany, in the early 1930s, the acclaimed Swiss film director Emil Nägeli receives the assignment of a lifetime: travel to Japan and make a film to establish the dominance of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi empire once and for all. But his handlers are unaware that Nägeli has colluded with the Jewish film critics to pursue an alternative objective―to create a monumental, modernist, allegorical spectacle to warn the world of the horror to come. Meanwhile, in Japan, the film minister Masahiko Amakasu intends to counter Hollywood’s growing influence and usher in a new golden age of Japanese cinema by exploiting his Swiss visitor. The arrival of Nägeli’s film-star fiancée and a strangely thuggish, pistol-packing Charlie Chaplin―as well as the first stirrings of the winds of war―soon complicates both Amakasu’s and Nägeli’s plans, forcing them to face their demons . . . and their doom."The Dead is the beautiful, brilliant, and utterly mad novel that Thomas Mann would have written had he known the East like Yukio Mishima and loved his adopted Hollywood with the gusto of Nathanael West." ―Joshua Cohen"The Dead is a story of love and sadness in times when the weak were broken by the unforgiving ideologies of fascism and National Socialism . . . I read The Dead twice in a row, first for the story and then for the beauty of the prose." ―Sjón

Picador

Eurotrash: A Novel

Liveright

The few dozen tourists—and a few journalists—who come annually to the North Korean capital of Pyongyang are accompanied by guides and are only allowed to see what the regime blinders for their viewing. For the visitors, actors often represent pedestrians, and the consumer goods seen in stores are unavailable to the public at large. The statistics heaped upon the visitors are dubious at best.Kim Jong Il's People's Republic of North Korea is a gigantic installation, a simulation, a play. Eva Munz, Christian Kracht, and Lukas Nikol traveled to this land to take pictures of a country from which there are no pictures. What they show in The Ministry of Truth is a window view of the gigantic 3-D production of Kim Jong Il, who writes the nation's statistics and authors its film script. Because no accurate view is available of this total installation, the authors make the only one possible: They comment on their photos with quotations from a didactic book on the art of film written by the dictator—who not only collects wine and Mazda RX-7 sports cars, but also has an enormous film library. Christian Kracht is a celebrated journalist and author and the editor of the German cultural magazine Der Freund. The photographs of Eva Munz and Lukas Nikol have had numerous international exhibitions.

The Ministry of Truth: Kim Jong-Il's North Korea

Arts & Photography

Photography & Video

Feral House

In The Dead, the follow-up to his acclaimed novel Imperium (a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year), Christian Kracht mines the feverish film culture of the 1930s to produce a Gothic tale of global conspiracy, personal loss, and historical entanglements large and small. In Berlin, Germany, in the early 1930s, the acclaimed Swiss film director Emil N�geli receives the assignment of a lifetime: travel to Japan and make a film to establish the dominance of Adolf Hitler's Nazi empire once and for all. But his handlers are unaware that N�geli has colluded with the Jewish film critics to pursue an alternative objective-to create a monumental, modernist, allegorical spectacle to warn the world of the horror to come. Meanwhile, in Japan, the film minister Masahiko Amakasu intends to counter Hollywood's growing influence and usher in a new golden age of Japanese cinema by exploiting his Swiss visitor. The arrival of N�geli's film-star fiancee and a strangely thuggish, pistol-packing Charlie Chaplin-as well as the first stirrings of the winds of war-soon complicates both Amakasu's and N�geli's plans, forcing them to face their demons . . . and their doom.

The Dead

Genre Fiction

Tantor Media, Inc.

Eurotrash

DENOEL

LIBRETTO

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