Overview

Winner of Switzerland's Grand Prix Literatur 2024 In his short lyric novella, Dreaming Jack, Klaus Merz transports us into a family dynamic distilled like none other-the story of a Swiss bakers' family assuaging their torments and demons, all the while struggling with illness and mortality, with abandonment and absolution. With spare, poignant observations, Lukas Renz, Merz's young protagonist, propels us cinematically into his predestination-and with it, the death of almost an entire household. Still, each passing is heartfelt, each soul duly honored, each artifact gracefully embalmed and kept on display. Dreaming Jack is a work like no other: the distillation of a common-uncommon, a tragi-comic novella where both the micro- and macroscopic meet on the hem of Grandmother's winter coat, in the flutter of Mother's nightdress, in Father's contorted epileptic fits, or the cosmic pulsing of Brother Sol's continuously expanding head. An uncanny, Swiss coming-of-age story, exquisitely morphed into English by poet and translator Marc Vincenz.

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9781963908961

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Reviews

""Above all, Merz wields his deceptively simple diction to pry open our hidden secrets: what we leave unsaid, what we neglect, what we avoid."" -John Taylor

Author Information

Klaus Merz was born in 1945 in Aarau and lives in Unterkulm, Switzerland. He has won many literary awards, including the Hermann Hesse Prize for Literature, the Swiss Schiller Foundation Poetry Prize and the Friedrich Hölderlin Prize in 2012. He has published over 40 works of poetry and fiction. His latest novel is The Argentinian (Der Argentinier, Haymon, 2009) and his recent collections of verse are Unexpected Development (Unerwarteter Verlauf, Haymon, 2013), Helios Hauls (Helios Transport, Haymon 2016), firm (firma, Haymon 2019) and In the House, Still Light (Noch Licht im Haus, Haymon, 2023). In 2024 Klaus Merz won the Grand Prix for Swiss Literature (Switzerland's highest literary prize). Marc Vincenz is a multi-lingual translator, poet, fiction writer, journalist, editor, musician and artist. He has published over 40 books of poetry, fiction and translation. His recent poetry collections, include, The Pearl Diver of Irunmani, A Splash of Cave Paint, The King of Prussia is Drunk on Stars, The Mayfly Codex, IRØNCLAD, and forthcoming in 2026 with White Pine Press, No More Animal Poems. His translation of award-winning Swiss poet and novelist, Klaus Merz' selected poems, An Audible Blue, won the 2023 Massachusetts Book Award for Translated Literature. He translates from the German, Romanian, French, Icelandic, and Spanish.

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