Gretel and the Great War

"No staid work of history, this. Sachs draws from the madcap, darkly comic tradition of postmodern European fiction to reimagine the continent's catastrophic destiny . . . Like Thomas Bernhard before him, Sachs is a very funny writer unafraid of italics and exclamation marks, which he marshals against the absurdity of the world." --Dustin Illingworth, The New York Times Book Review

"Inventive . . . Whimsical . . . Fusing period atmosphere with fairy tale, Ehrlich Sachs hints at modern themes while summoning an unexpected imaginary place." --The New Yorker

"One of my greatest pleasures as a reader [. . .] is discovering a new writer who's bravely doing their own thing, and then awaiting each new book from them. Since I first read Sachs in n+1 almost a decade ago, nothing of his has disappointed . . . Sachs's fiction achieves its own kind of timeliness, reaching for deeper significance through the absurd." --Ben Roth, Agni

"Sachs's Vienna is a vibrant and petty place, full of insecure authorities and overconfident revolutionaries seeking to overturn everything established. . . . Sachs is a clever, self-aware storyteller, and he draws creative tension from his ostensibly childlike narrative form." --Robert Rubsam, The Washington Post

"Gretel reads like the best of Italo Calvino's pseudo-magical literary puzzles replete with the kind of intrigue often attributed to authors like Jesse Ball and László Krasznahorkai. Like those authors, reading Sachs can feel like getting lost in a machination set by a master architect." --Joe Stanek, Chicago Review of Books

"A treasury of connected tales . . . Their mode is metafictional, containing narratives within narratives, like those in the Arabian Nights. Gradually they form a mosaic not only of the chaos of wartime Austria-Hungary but of the fate of Gretel's broken family." --Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal

"Intricate, unexpected, and delightful . . . An ingeniously woven novel . . . Playful, charming, and brilliant--a profundity made of toylike whimsies." --Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"Every surprising new turn arrives with an incandescent and terrifying sense of inevitability . . . A large readership of this crazy book would make the world a safer and saner place." --Arthur Willemse, World Literature Today

"Sachs lends a touch of the fantastical to Viennese life at the end of WWI in this inventive novel . . . [He] keenly captures the pulse of a city on the cusp of immense change. This spirited volume lingers long after the final page." --Publishers Weekly

"Adam Ehrlich Sachs makes books that make their own traditions. This is the highest praise I know, for serious." --Joshua Cohen, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Netanyahus

"Relentless, in the best way possible. Think Mary Poppins's satchel, think one deranged matrioshka constantly coming out from under another--Gretel and the Great War is the gift that keeps on giving. Adam Ehrlich Sachs continues to prove he is one of our most daring and original writers." --Camille Bordas, author of How to Behave in a Crowd

"Countless writers take pleasure in the style of their own sentences. Few of them provide such pleasure to their readers. Sachs provides it again and again. He doesn't let up. Plus he's funny as hell. No writer alive is more startlingly alive." --Adam Levin, author of Mount Chicago

"His lunatics clamor to be believed, but Sachs wants something else: pin-thin-fancies that braid a rope to make your legs dance." --Jesse Ball