Adventures in Immediate Irreality

Max Blecher

Sleekly liquid work, the poetry of seething matter itself.

Dustin Illingworth, 3:AM

Proclaimed the Kafka of Romania by Eugène Ionesco, Max Blecher wrote this incandescent masterpiece shortly before his untimely death.

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Adventures in Immediate Irreality

Fiction by Max Blecher

Translated from Romanian by Michael Henry Heim

Adventures in Immediate Irreality, the masterwork of the Romanian writer Max Blecher, vividly paints the crises of “irreality” that plagued him in his youth: eerie unsettling mirages wherein he would glimpse future events. In gliding chapters that move with a peculiar dream logic of their own, this memoiristic novel sketches the tremulous, frightening, and exhilarating awakenings of a very young man.

Buy Adventures in Immediate Irreality

Paperback(published Feb, 17 2015)

ISBN
9780811217606
Price US
14.95
Price CN
16.95
Page Count
112
Portrait of Max Blecher

Max Blecher

20th-century Romanian-born Jewish poet, prose writer, and translator of works into Romanian

Sleekly liquid work, the poetry of seething matter itself.

Dustin Illingworth, 3:AM

A book deserving of new readers, by a writer whose remaining body of work I can only hope will finally appear in its entirety in this country.

The Nation

When you read his books it’s hard to believe your eyes. The author of this masterpiece was a twenty-five-year-old already weakened by disease, but Blecher’s words don’t merely describe the objects—they dig their talons into the things and hoist them high.

Herta Müller

The thing that renders Blecher’s gaze so penetrating is the eroticism that dwells in all things, pining to get out.

Herta Müller

Blecher has often been compared to Kafka (and not without reason), but the strongest connection, however, is with Salvador Dali. Like Dali’s ‘soft clocks,’ everything here is about to melt. It is as though Blecher’s world is always on the verge of ontological collapse; from behind the veil of things, nothingness stares out at him.

The Times Literary Supplement

An extraordinary writer, in the family of Kafka and Bruno Schulz. A short life, overwhelmed by disease; a small—but great—magical work. Hallucinatory, intense, and deeply authentic, its literary force is fueled, paradoxically and not entirely, by an acute sensitivity and ardor.

Norman Manea