Dark Satellites

'Meyer's multifaceted prose, studded with allusions to both high and popular culture, and superbly translated by Katy Derbyshire, is musical and often lyrical, elevating lowbrow punning and porn-speak into literary devices... [Bricks and Mortar] is admirably ambitious and in many places brilliant - a book that not only adapts an arsenal of modernist techniques for the twenty-first century but, more importantly, reveals their enduring poetic potential.'
-- Anna Katharina Schaffner, Times Literary Supplement

'A journey to the end of the night for 20/21st century Germany. Meyer reworks Döblin and Céline into a modern epic prose film with endless tracking shots of the gash of urban life, bought flesh and the financial transaction (the business of sex); memory as unspooling corrupted tape; journeys as migrations, as random as history and its splittings. A shimmering cast threatens to fly from the page, leaving only a revenant's dream - sky, weather, lights-on-nobody-home, buried bodies, night rain. What new prose should be and rarely is; Meyer rewrites the rules to produce a great hallucinatory channel-surfer of a novel.'
-- Chris Petit, author of Robinson

'The point of Im Stein [Bricks and Mortar] is that nothing's "in stone" Clemens Meyer's novel reads like a shifty, corrupted collocation of .docs, lifted off the laptop of a master genre-ist and self-reviser. It's required reading for fans of the Great Wolfgangs (Hilbig and Koeppen), and anyone interested in casual gunplay, drug use, or sex.'
-- Joshua Cohen, author of Book of Numbers

'This is a wonderfully insightful, frank, exciting and heart-breaking read. Bricks and Mortar is like diving into a Force 10 gale of reality, full of strange voices, terrible events and a vision of neoliberal capitalism that is chillingly accurate.'
-- A. L. Kennedy, author of Serious Sweet
'Figures from society's margins are at the centre of the stories... Dark Satellites throws a perceptive light on circumscribed lives on the edges of Europe.'
-- David Mills, The Sunday Times

'Clemens Meyer's great art of describing people takes the form of the Russian doll principle: a story within a story within a story. From German jihad to a Prussian refugee drama, so much is so artfully interwoven that his work breaks the mould of the closed narrative. Images of history extending into the present are what make this collection a literary sensation.'
-- Katharina Teutsch, Die Zeit

'Dark Satellites proves once again that he is one of the strongest German writers. His short stories possess depth and truth, linking East German history with the present and painting dense and perceptive portraits of what we call 'common people' - without a trace of mawkishness or kitsch.'
-- Heinrich Oemsen, Hamburger Abendblatt

'Meyer's writing is brittle, laconic, clear, intense - and once again on top form. Short stories are clearly his forte. He finds memorable images for his themes: a dance without music in an unused Russian canteen; a midnight haircut; a man who slides into another identity after a break-in to his home and leaves his briefcase, the last requisite of his old life, in an abandoned shop. Meyer's stories are quiet, tragic and once again populated by ordinary people, for whom he has always harboured sympathies.'
--Steffen Roye, Am Erker