The Tidings of the Trees

by Wolfgang Hilbig, Isabel Fargo Cole (Translator)

Overview

Where once was a beautiful wood now stands a desolate field smothered in ash and garbage, and here a young man named Waller has terrorizing encounters with grotesque figures named "the garbagemen." As Waller becomes fascinated with these desperate men who eke out a survival by rooting through their nation’s waste, he imagines they are also digging through its past as their government erases its history and walls itself off from the outside world.

One of celebrated East German author Wolfgang Hilbig’s most accessible and resonant works, The Tidings of the Trees is about the politics that rip us apart, the stories we tell for survival, and the absolute importance of words to nations and people. Featuring some of Hilbig’s most striking, poetic, and powerful images, this flawless novella perfectly balances politics and literature.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781931883726
Publisher:	Two Lines Press
Publication date:	06/12/2018
Pages:	112
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.20(d)
Age Range:	15 Years

About the Author

Wolfgang Hilbig (1941–2007) was one of the major German writers to emerge in the postwar era. Though raised in East Germany, he proved so troublesome to the authorities that in 1985 he was granted permission to emigrate west. The author of over 20 books, he received virtually all of Germany’s major literary prizes, capped by the 2002 Georg Büchner Prize, Germany’s highest literary honor.

Isabel Fargo Cole is a U.S.-born, Berlin-based writer and translator. Her translations include Boys and Murderers by Hermann Ungar (Twisted Spoon Press, 2006), All the Roads Are Open by Annemarie Schwarzenbach (Seagull Books, 2011), The Jew Car by Franz Fühmann (Seagull Books, 2013), and The Sleep of the Righteous by Wolfgang Hilbig. The recipient of a prestigious PEN/Heim Translation Grant in 2013, she is the initiator and co-editor of No-mans-land.org, an online magazine for new German literature in English.

Editorial Reviews

"Hilbig’s was among the most significant prose and poetry written not just in the GDR but in all of postwar Germany—East or West." — Joshua Cohen, author of Book of Numbers
"Whenever I read Hilbig’s books . . . I am profoundly shaken. this language practically slices me open.” — Clemens Meyer, author of Bricks and Mortar
"Wolfgang Hilbig is an artist of immense stature" — László Krasznahorkai, recipient of the 2015 International Man Booker Prize and author of Satantango and Seiobo There Below
"The Tidings of the Trees mulls the legacy, ramifications, and enduring trauma of consequential and devastating political history. Through his tormented protagonist, Hilbig . . . strives to make sense of the haunting aftereffects of his nation's dark history." — Jeremy Garber, Powell’s Books
"Evokes the luminous prose of W.G. Sebald.” — The New York Times
"Out of the ugliness of history and the wasted landscape of his home, he has created stories of disconsolate beauty." — The Wall Street Journal
“[Hilbig writes as] Edgar Allan Poe could have written if he had been born in Communist East Germany.” — Los Angeles Review of Books
"Hilbig’s prose is vivid and poetic." — Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher