With Thanks to our Atomic Piles of Literature: Indie Booksellers on The Interim

This November, Two Lines Press will publish The Interim, Wolfgang Hilbig’s magnum opus, considered by many (more on this in just a second, I promise) to be the late German’s very best novel. We wouldn’t dare disagree. With thanks to translator Isabel Fargo Cole, The Interim is the kind of book that announces its author’s immense artistry, with its winding, breathless sentences delivered coated in defiant humor, from the very first page. It’s impossible to miss and difficult to unsee. The prose glows and then burns; it draws you in and then singes your coat.

The Interim follows C. a successful, if moody, East German writer as he journeys to the capitalist West in the years before the fall of the Berlin Wall. In the novel, C. bounces from bar to bar, train station to station, flailing from -ism to -ism. He is a man without a country. An alienated witness to world history on violent autopilot. A writer who does not know the role the writer plays in “a century of lies.” What’s a writer to do? That’s the question at the heart of The Interim, and it animates C.’s every thought and move, as he’s overwhelmed by the excesses of capitalism—addiction, consumerism, pay-per-view pornography, etc.—and underwhelmed by the literary socializing that sustains his financial existence, as well as the slate gray life that taunts him back in the GDR.

We’ve been publishing Wolfgang Hilbig in Isabel Fargo Cole’s masterful translations since 2015, beginning with The Sleep of the Righteous and followed by the short, potent works Old Rendering Plant (2017), The Tidings of the Trees (2018), and The Females (2018). To my mind, we have been steadily working toward this moment. The Interim is undoubtedly Hilbig’s most ambitious work. It is longer, more patient. It also serves as a remarkable distillation of some of his most potent themes: anxiety, statelessness, and guilt, for example.

All this is to say, we wanted to do something special for this book, particularly for the readers who’ve been supportive of this brooding postwar German writer all along. You guessed it: independent booksellers. Upon discovering the following line in the book, our fate was sealed: “The bookstore was an atomic pile of literature; if it had imploded, this would have been the place where the force of the human spirit finally bored its way to the earth’s core.” Missing an in-person Winter Institute due to the pandemic, we decided to send out special bookseller-exclusive galleys of the book adorned with little more than that incredibly Hilbigian endorsement of the bookstore.

The booksellers responded in kind, sharing general (and specific!) enthusiasm, photos, and words of praise. Jeremy Garber of Powell’s wrote that “The late author’s 2000 novel may well be his best…The Interim, for all its bleakness and melancholia, gleams brilliantly with the incandescence of an all-consuming inferno.” Brazos Bookstore’s Mark Haber, a longtime Hilbig fanatic, calls the book “ideal for our fractured times.” Matt Keliher at Subtext Books considers the book “a masterpiece of one of European literature’s finest authors.” Lori Feathers of Interabang puts it succinctly: “Simply wonderful!” Timothy Otte of Wild Rumpus Books: “The best of his books.” Calum Barnes at Blackwell’s in Oxford: “A revelation in European literature to me.” We could go on.

In short, The Interim is indie bookseller approved. You’ll find additional praise below. Pre-order The Interim, out November 2, 2021, from an indie bookseller today.

“Ideal for our fractured times, Wolfgang Hilbig’s The Interim walks the tightrope of unknowing, from East to West Berlin and back again. From dispossession and displacement to capitalism and communism, Hilbig’s antihero is all of us, a stranger adrift in the modern world. Wolfgang Hilbig was a visionary, each of his novels awash in prophecy.” —Mark Haber, Brazos Bookstore (Houston, TX) 

“The late author’s 2000 novel may well be his best… Hilbig’s portrayal of a broken, ineffectual man awash in an age of dislocation is both vigorous and unyielding. The Interim, for all its bleakness and melancholia, gleams brilliantly with the incandescence of an all-consuming inferno.” —Jeremy Garber, Powell’s (Portland, OR)

“A transcendent reading experience about a German culture cleaved in two, and a man trying to find his way through the middle. A masterpiece of one of European literature’s finest authors.” —Matt Keliher, Subtext Books (St. Paul, MN)

“Our ‘hero’ takes us on many liquor-fueled Mobius Teacup Rides between East and West Germany, keeping the limbo bench warm on the sidelines of love and lust, looking for someone, something, or some country to blame for his writer’s block, impotence, and irresponsibility. Told in such a comedic, controlled scatter to keep the reader comfortably teetered on a seat’s edge, if sitting’s a thing said reader’s into.” —Ian McCord, Avid Bookshop (Athens, GA)

“What a treat that we have yet another of Hilbig’s great works available in English, thanks to Two Lines Press and translator Isabel Fargo Cole. Hilbig’s wonderfully perceptive descriptions of everyday life are on full display in this funny, melancholy tale of a writer, C, whose life is in a perpetual holding pattern due to his chronic indecisiveness. The Interim is an absurd, poignant exploration of being ‘stuck,’ and one man’s struggle to understand his life and his art. Simply wonderful!” —Lori Feathers, Interabang Books (Dallas, TX)

“As a reader in a politically divided America at the beginning of the 21st Century, I find a lot to learn from and admire in the work of postwar German writers. Wolfgang Hilbig is among the best of those writers and The Interim is the best of his books. Hilbig’s prose is layered and rich in Isabel Fargo Cole’s terrific translation, often resulting in moments of astonishing lucidity… A part of me will always be thinking about The Interim.”—Timothy Otte, Wild Rumpus Books (Minneapolis, MN)

“A revelation in European literature to me. A shambling, anxiety-riddled writer shuttles between East and West Germany at the end of the ‘century of lies’, mournfully chronicling a modernity that’s gone awry.” —Calum Barnes, Blackwell’s Books (Oxford, UK)