Kino: A Novel

Fiction. "KINO is a fast, complex, exhilarating roadster ride through history and time, a mystery, a documentary, a remarkable remix of reality and imagination. It is the story of a woman who becomes obsessed with her grandfather, a visionary film director in the Germany of the nineteen-twenties through World War II. Tracing the arc of his spectacular decline, she risks a husband and her ordinary life, but uncovers the powerful bindings of family, the sweet, dark loam of loss, and the instant-on high-voltage current of pulp fascism, dirty pictures, propaganda, cultural piracy, art and money. It's quick but complicated, feverish, trying, speculative, high-minded, and occasionally Goebbels-esque. Everything forced into close and incendiary quarters. KINO is intoxicating Euro-brew, written with enormous skill and dedication."—Frederick Barthelme