Babyfucker
Fiction by Urs Allemann
Translated by Peter Smith
Afterword by Vanessa Place
English | German
Fiction | $13.00
ISBN 13: 978-1-934254-16-5
Pages: 134
Binding: Softcover, Perfect
A Beckettian character, who may or may not be trapped in a room with four baskets full of infants, focuses obsessively on a single sentence—“I fuck babies.” This virtuoso text by Swiss experimental writer Urs Allemann won the prestigious Ingeborg Bachmann Preis des Landes Kärnten in 1991 and caused one of the biggest literary scandals in the post-1945 German-speaking world. Translated now for the first time in a new-bilingual edition, Babyfucker will change your idea of what literature can be and do. Babyfucker belongs in the canon of twentieth-century provocations that includes Bataille’s The Story of the Eye, Delany’s Hogg, and Cooper’s Frisk.
Read Excerpt: babyfucker_excerpt.pdf
Reviews and More
“A stunning, exquisite, perfect, and difficult little benchmark of a novel that makes literature that pre-dates it seem deprived.” —Dennis Cooper
Read more on Dennis Cooper’s blog_
“Urs Allemann is without a doubt the most poetic of all dialecticians and the most dialectical of a poets.” —Samuel Moser, Neue Zurcher Zeitung
“In the impressive logical consistency of this narrative, in its other logic, there is no life and no death, only a longing for them, a fear of them.” —Heinz Schafroth
“An experimental text like those of Beckett and the Cabaret Voltaire Dadists.” —Klaus Amann
“The figure Allemann gives voice to is stranded in the middle of an incomplete maturation process, an infantile monstrosity unable to raise itself out of the chthonic fluids of human prehistory.” —Juliane Vogel
About Urs Allemann
Urs Allemann was born in the city of Schlieren, near Zurich, (Switzerland) in 1948. From 1986 to 2004 he directed the section of culture and literature of the Swiss journal of Basle (Basler Zeitung). He published three books of narrative and several works of poetry, including: Fuzzhase, Poems (1988), Holder die Polder (2001), Schoen, Schoen! (2003), and Im Kinde Schwirren Die Ahnen (2008). He currently lives in Bettingen in Basle.
This project is supported, in part, by Pro Helvetia, Swiss Arts Council