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

BUY NOW at LARB BOOKS

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.

Praise for babyfucker

“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

“‘I fuck babies,’ is how he introduces himself, and perhaps those with weak constitutions will venture no further. To stop there, however, is to let your scruples deprive you of a severe and ugly gem; and while I would hate to diminish the shock value of the book, let’s be clear: There is no babyfucking here…”

–Review of Contemporary Ficton, Spring 2010

“A man was in a room that was the worst place to ever be and that man was me and maybe the room was me too but I was afraid to look at where I was even though you might have been in the room.”

-More at HTML Giant

“I hate to think that it is the fate of indie presses to take all the risks and then lose authors to larger publishers when they’ve been vetted on smaller stages. But, if it is to be our lot, so be it. Allemann will surely be gobbled up by a larger house, but Penguin wouldn’t touch a title like Baby Fucker [sic] with a ten-foot pole, regardless of it’s literary force and prowess. Germans have all the fun and culture.”

-Featured in The Big Secret: 10 Indie-Publishers and 10 Books You Might Not Have Heard of For All The Wrong Reasons

“This is a book to talk about. This is a book you want to carry around with you, just so people can ask you what it’s about.”

–The Big Other

“Yes, Babyfucker may be a book that one is reluctant to pick up because of that very off-putting title, but it is a text worth engaging with. Allemann does something interesting here — not in the sensational-pornographic sense (definitely not …), but in the (im)purely literary sense. And he does it well.”

-Read more at The Complete Review

“If there are specific sexual visions here, they must belong mainly to the reader, not the text. Among other unsettling things, the volume (which is yellow and pink, tiny, and cute) shows the reader’s involvement in literary atrocities, in any violation committed by shared imagination.”

-Nick Montfort post position

“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

Babyfucker Blog Project