wrong

WRONG: Performance, lecture, lesson, interview, critique: all wrong, time and again. And yet, it is important as an author to participate directly in public discussions through these kinds of textual interventions, lively, chaotic, glimmering, the self presented without protection, not just distilled in the final death-form of the work.

Writing as if you were talking, as if you wanted to quickly explain to your interlocutor what you think of a writer like Joachim Bessing, Michel Houellebecq, or Albert von Schirnding, or about the legal dispute between Suhrkamp Verlag and the investor Hans Barlach. In the interviews, he talks about his own books, about the photography book september eleventh 2010, his novel Johann Holtrop, or his play Realm of Death. In two speeches and two essays, Rainald Goetz has attempted to give an underlying definition of his authorship, but in tone, here, too, he is inspired by the directness of direct human dialogue and the fury of explanation in spoken language. Which makes WRONG a luminous book.

»The eternal poet of the now still has something to tell the present.« Jens-Christian Rabe, Süddeutsche Zeitung

»He is still one of the best contemporary writers of the last 40 years.« Vincent Sauer, neues deutschland

»If you spend days delving into Rainald Goetz’s texts, at some point you’ll notice a sharpening of your own senses and judgment, an intolerance for everything predetermined, half thought out; the voice that speaks from the letters on these pages, its ethical and aesthetic authority, accompanies the reader on their travels and in their encounters, making them more attentive people. Which is perhaps the greatest feat literature can achieve.« Andreas Bernard, DER SPIEGEL