Hare Prose

Like a trick image that shifts between adventure and memoir, magic and the everyday

»If that's all there is, I’m moving out!« someone yells and heads off in their seven-league boots and their travel socks. A hare in the back seat. We travel straight through time, through the ages, and out into pitch-dark outer space. In a hand-drawn plane through the sky and through memories: of two grandmothers, one pale, one dark, one in-tact, one damaged. A grandfather and his furrowed hands. A brother and his tree. Of frantic dreams, twisted fairy tales, and Purple Rain.

Maren Kames’s Hare Prose is mercurial and full of heart. Packed with »punk, punk, punk« and tenderness. Finely woven stuff stands next to precisely spellbound perceptions of the world. We listen to Glenn Gould and Billie Eilish, see Lionel Messi dribbling through the universe, and abseil down from the fixed stars with the hare. A book like a childhood summer, excessive, »gaping open«, and luminously beautiful.

»What a linguistically effervescent delight!« Deutschlandfunk Kultur

»After reading [this book], you look at the world differently.« Paul Jandl, Neue Zürcher Zeitung

»A compositional tour de force.« Christian Metz, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

»This Hare Prose is rich, new, and full of humour … Great, entirely different literature. I give it a hundred points, two hundred hares, a thousand hearts.« Gerrit Bartels, Der Tagesspiegel

»A mind-blowing work of art, a verbal maelstrom, an adventure story … Hare Prose offers an immediate experience of literature, while keeping a safe distance from the often so flat-footed realism of German literature.« David Hugendick, DIE ZEIT

»With her overkill of literary techniques, [Maren Kames] neatly captures the political mood of the present.« Carsten Otte, taz. die tageszeitung

»A tour through the life and family history of the narrator and the author, an existential inventory around the mid-stage of life. … And so, we dream our way through to the moving Swabian family story at the core of this book.« Marie Schmidt, Süddeutsche Zeitung

»Maren Kames’s Hare Prose is absurd literature in the most brilliant sense of the term: a fast-paced, shrill, wild novel – and on top of it all, it’s hilarious. A must-read!« Björn Hayer, der Freitag

»A new linguistic adventure by an author whose books do not fit in the traditional pigeonholes.« 3sat, Kulturzeit

»Maren Kames sure does know how to make a declaration of love to art. … Guaranteed to provide bags of fun.« Andreas Platthaus, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

»Everything in this book is permeated by a genuinely poetic grasping of the world and language. Kames tells her story with giddy wit, envious self-deprecation, and an irresistible tendency to address the absurd and the risible in everyday life. One of the minor miracles of this Hare Prose is the way that the fleet of foot exists beside the weighty, the burdensome beside the airy, without it ever seeming inappropriate or salacious in the slightest.« Daniel Graf, republik.ch

»So refreshing ... So much joy in the sound, the rhythm, the rich vocabulary.« Lisa Kreißler, NDR Kultur