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Shattering the Muses shows us the cataclysm of iconoclasm: that those who destroy idols will also destroy civilization, that art needs to be defended from barbarism: but, just as importantly, that art is itself laden with barbarism: that Apollo can, and does, flay Marsyas. Hanshe writes with the ferocity and verve that have made him one of our most provocative contemporary voices, but he has added a conceptual subtlety and a historical insight that make Shattering The Muses a moving elegy for the aesthetic complexity our world is on the brink of losing. -- Nicholas Birns, author of Theory After Theory and Contemporary Australian Literature The anguish of the forfeiture, almost perhaps sacrifice, he writes. Thought is buried; thought is exiled, he writes elsewhere. In a work shot through with images of desolated libraries and assassinated poets, Hanshe offers both a defiant outcry and agonizing elegy for a history of book-burnings and executions. His text is therefore a most powerful chronicle: that is, it immortalizes an ongoing existential conflict between machineries of ideological suppression and the visionaries who stain pages on behalf of a world that annihilates them. Hanshe thus takes his place among a legion of solitary, war-torn writers -- Cendrars, Radnoti, Char, de Nerval -- whose words stand against the many regimes of order and domination around us. This book is a counter-current to those forces that look to desolate thought. This book honors our kind. -- Jason Mohagheh, author of The Chaotic Imagination, Inflictions: The Writing of Violence in the Middle East, and Insurgent, Poet, Mystic, Sectarian As a series of profound meditations and digressions on the entropy of time and life, as well as the menacing realities of terror and fanaticism, Shattering the Muses establishes Hanshe as one of the most innovative and boldest authors currently writing in the English language. At once poetic and philosophical, utopic and dystopic, tragic and comic, this work is a veritable hymn to the redemptive power of art and literature. It is a poignant and beautifully conceived work of art that in turns dazzles and disturbs, an antifascist art-work that upholds Nietzsche's promise that one day man may be delivered from the spirit of revenge. Reading Hanshe makes for an extraordinary experience.-- Keith Ansell-Pearson, Professor of Philosophy, University of Warwick Don Quixote's adventures began when he sealed and plastered over the door to his library, enclosing his beloved books forever within the center of his ancestral home. On a larger scale, as Ezra Pound noted, culture begins when we have forgotten the book. Shattering the Muses explores similar terrain and a similar paradox of creative destruction. Cast between word and silence, memory and forgetting, the reader enters a labyrinthine assemblage of stories, essays, fictions, facts, anecdotes, quotations, and images that imagine a world in which art and literature might end with a bang, not a whimper. Amid the contemporary din and chatter of blogs and comment streams, the book collects and recollects moments in the life of literature - and in the writing lives of Radnoti, Beckett, Char, Celan, Nietzsche, Rimbaud and others - wherein words teeter on the edge of a twofold annihilation, that of the burning of books and of books that burn from within. In either case, as Pound also suggested, the book should be a ball of light in one's hand. Shattering the Muses enacts and demonstrates a cry for such a vision of writing. -- Stuart Kendall, tr. of George Bataille's Inner Experience, Blanchot's Lautreamont & Sade, and other works.

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"Rainer J. Hanshe is a writer. He is the author of two novels, The Acolytes (2010) and The Abdication (2012), and a hybrid text created in collaboration with Federico Gori, Shattering the Muses (2017). His second novel, The Abdication, has been translated into Slovakian (2015), Italian (2016), and Turkish (2017). He is the editor of Richard Foreman's Plays with Films (2013) and Wordsworth's Fragments (2014), and the translator of Baudelaire's My Heart Laid Bare & Other Texts (2017). Hanshe has also written numerous essays on Nietzsche, principally concerning synesthesia, incubation, and agonism. He is the founder of Contra Mundum Press and Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics. Other work of his has appeared in Sinn und Form, Jelenkor, Asymptote, Quarterly Conversation, ChrisMarker.org, Black Sun Lit, and elsewhere. Hanshe is currently working on two novels, Humanimality, and Now, Wonder, and In Praise of Dogs, a photojournalism project with Harald Hutter. Federico Gori, who was born in Prato in 1977, currently lives and works in Pistoia. After studying painting at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence, he was invited to show his work in Prato's Palazzo del Comune in 2002 in the context of an event entitled Gemine Muse, which was devoted to displaying the work of young artists in the museums of Europe. He was awarded a resident stage in 2003 by the Fondazione ""Il Giardino di Daniel Spoerri. Hic Terminus Haeret,"" where he produced a site-specific work for display in the park. The exhibitions in which he has taken part in recent years include: 54^ Biennale di Venezia, Padiglione Accademie, Venezia, 2011; Di fragilità e potenza, Palazzo Strozzi, Firenze, 2013; Talent Prize 2013, where he won the Special Award ""Metaenergia,"" Casa dell'Architettura, Roma, 2013; Come Afferrare il Vento, Museo Palazzo Fabroni Arti Visive Contemporanee, Pistoia, 2015; Colorful, Sifang Art Museum, Nanjing, Jiangsu P. R. China, 2015; Governare il caso, L'opera nel suo farsi dagli anni sessanta ai nostri giorni, Pinacoteca Comunale di Città di Castello, Perugia, 2015; Rebuilding the Future, Rossana Maiorca Cycle Route, Siracusa, 2015; and Underground #2, Museo Palazzo Fabroni Arti Visive Contemporanee, Pistoia 2016. In 2017, he was an Artist in Residence at La Panaceé, Centre d'Art Contemporain, Montpellier, France, invited by Le Bureau des Arts et Territoires for the European Project The Spur ETACEC 16-18."

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