One of Lit Hub \'s most anticipated books of 2024 Gretel and the Great War is the gift that keeps on giving.
Is it any wonder that this world--soon to vanish anyway in a war to end all wars--was one from which Gretel\'s father wished to shelter her?.
And then there\'s Gretel\'s own mother, who will do whatever it takes to sing onstage at the City Theater. . .
There are artists who ape the innocence of children, and scientists who insist that children are anything but innocent .
Crossing paths and purposes, their stories interweave until a single picture emerges, that of a decadent, death-obsessed, oversexed empire buzzing with the ideas of Freud and Karl Kraus.
Twenty-four more stories follow in alphabetical order, about an Immunologist and a Jeweler, a Revolutionary and a Satirist, a Waif and an X-ray Technician and a Zionist.
The next day a second story arrives, about a Ballet Master who develops a new position of the feet.
But he encloses a bedtime story he asks the doctor to read aloud to her, about an Architect whose radically modern creation has caused a Great scandal.
The man reveals only her name: Gretel.
A doctor appeals to the public for information about her past and receives a single response, from a sanatorium patient who claims to be her father.
A once-mighty empire has finally come crashing down--and a mysterious young woman, unable to speak, has turned up on the streets.
Vienna, 1919. --Camille Bordas, author of How to Behave in a Crowd A brisk, seductive, and dazzlingly inventive novel that shows us the dark side of early twentieth-century Vienna.
Adam Ehrlich Sachs continues to prove he is one of our most daring and original writers.
One of Lit Hub \'s most anticipated books of 2024 Gretel and the Great War is the gift that keeps on giving
