»You almost feel like […] kissing your own knee in delight.« Süddeutsche Zeitung

»Some might feel repulsion and wonder what on earth all of this is about. But literature doesn’t have to be about anything beyond literature. Its justification lies in what it is. Setz doesn’t tell his stories to shock: rather, he provides them with an immanent logic or an inner necessity and gives his characters psychological credibility.« Cicero

»He is the prodigy of German literature: radical, imperative, with a sound entirely different from his own generation. Of an apocalyptic desperation.« Die Zeit

»This is someone daring a radical counter-attack to the charmingly constructed literature of writing workshops, breaking free from the literary row-houses while whistling ominous songs.« Elmar Krekeler, Die Welt

»Clemens J. Setz has given new life to Grazer modernism, with rather sinister, potentially even malicious and cruel characters which share their curious plasticity with figures from computer games, eerily poised and brittle at the same time. « Thomas Steinfeld, Süddeutsche Zeitung

»This is a big one, one, for whom reality has not at all been written down yet in all its bizarre, grotesque, realistic and simulating aspects. On the contrary – it has just started.« neues deutschland online

»This radicality of a nearly air-tightly packed desperation existed in literature last in the years before Setz was born. It was there in Beckett’s garbage cans and in the last stories and plays by the mature Max Frisch.« Iris Radisch, Die Zeit

»Clemens J. Setz’s eighteen stories seem to make their appearance innocuously, in the garb of the everyday that everyone feels they know, and develop a brutality and viciousness which take the reader by surprise every time. Setz does something that is very rare in German literature. He is outspoken about bodies and sex in all its immediacy« Julia Encke, Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung

»His collection of short stories fulfills the expectations with a drumbeat. Here is a writer to be witnessed who masters crafts of writing which one didn’t even know existed before.« Richard Kämmerlings, Die Welt

»Setz supplies dramatic personality profiles which can make your skin crawl.« Sächsische Zeitung / Magazin

Leipzig Book Fair Prize 2011 Laureate:

At age 29, Clemens J. Setz was awarded the Leipzig Book Fair Prize in 2011 for his unconventional collection of short stories Die Liebe zur Zeit des Mahlstädter Kindes.
The jury stated: »The determining factors were Setz’ audacious composition, his idiosyncratic language and his consistent concept which leads to these equally original and uncanny stories. They get down to business with the disillusioned perspective on human kind that has long been accepted in the sciences but blissfully ignored in the arts. […] The award acknowledges a sinister and surprising prose experiment, for which a young writer had dared to gamble with the means of language.«

Love in the Times of the Mahlstädter Child