Alexander Kluge

Combining fact and fiction, each of the one hundred and two tales of Alexander Kluge’s Temple of the Scapegoat (dotted with photos of famous operas and their stars) compresses a lifetime of feeling and thought: Kluge is deeply engaged with the opera and an inventive wellspring of narrative notions. The titles of his stories suggest his many turns of mind: “Total Commitment,” “Freedom,” “Reality Outrivals Theater,” “The Correct Slowing-Down at the Transitional Point Between Terror and an Inkling of Freedom,” “A Crucial Character (Among Persons None of Whom Are Who They Think They Are),” and “Deadly Vocal Power vs.…

The thirty-eight tales of Cinema Stories combine fact and fiction, and they all revolve around movie-making. The book compresses a lifetime of feeling, thought, and practice: Kluge— considered the father of New German Cinema—is an inventive wellspring of narrative notions. “The power of his prose,” as Small Press noted, “exudes the sort of pregnant richness one might find in the briefest scenarios of unknown films.” Cinema Stories is a treasure box of strikingly original writing cinematic lore.…

The 173 stories collected in Alexander Kluge’s The Devil’s Blind Spot range from a dozen pages to just half a page in length: these tales are like novels in pill form. The whole is arranged in five chapters. The first group illustrates the little-known virtues of the Devil; the second explores love (from Kant to the opera); the third (entitled “Sarajevo Is Everywhere”) addresses power; the fourth considers the cosmos; and the fifth ranges all our “knowledge” against our feelings.…