Self-Portrait with Russian Piano: A Novel

A legendary literary figure who initiated a one-man Beat Generation in his native Germany, Wolf Wondratschek “is eccentric, monomaniacal, romantic—his texts are imbued with a wonderful, reckless nonchalance” (Patrick Süskind). Now, he tells a story of a man looking back on his life in an honest portrait of the artist as an old man.

Vienna is an uncanny, magical, and sometimes brutally alienating city. The past lives on in the cafés where lost souls come to kill time and hash over the bygone ...