Overview

September 1, 1939: Lódź, Poland is on the brink of invasion. When the sirens begin, the professor is sitting at the Astoria Café. The Astoria Café really did exist, but the professor is only a figment of a boy's imagination. In this work of historical metafiction, our present-day narrator recounts the story of Viktor Bauman, a disillusioned academic forced into the notorious Lódź Ghetto, Elsa Dietrich, a captive Gestapo secretary, and Elsa's estranged fianc�, Lieutenant Carl Becker, a troubled policeman whose fixation with the past is pushing him towards unspeakable cruelty. Set during the Nazi occupation of Poland, The Requisitions is about history, memory, and a novelist writing himself back into the lives of those who once lived.

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Reviews

"""Samu�l Lopez-Barrantes has provided us with a roadmap through some of the most dangerous and emotional moments of our time ... This page-turning book is a must-read for all those who value the work of a master storyteller in command of his material."" David A. Andelman, author of A Shattered Peace: Versailles 1919 and the Price We Pay Today ""Vibrant, shadowed, compelling and ultimately symphonic, The Requisitions offers the gift of love in an impossible situation. What starts in a Polish town in a cafe in 1939 ends in the hearts of readers, everywhere, now. Moving and, as intended, memorable."" Nor Hall, author of The Moon and the Virgin: Reflections on the Archetypal Feminine ""'The taste of transitoriness is on the tongue.' Something of that surrender, an echo of the medieval woodcut, the sorrowing starkness of Albrecht Durer, haunts this account of a Europe overshadowed by the imminent avalanche of history, a cataclysm its characters feel helpless, even unwilling to avert."" John Baxter, author of The Most Beautiful Walk in the World ""There is an inherent lyricism throughout this original and ambitious novel that seamlessly combines historical metafiction, memoir and cultural history along with philosophical inquiry. Deeply researched and masterfully constructed, The Requisitions traces the lives of captivating characters and leaves us with a deep sense of having traversed an arduous and unforgettable journey."" Heather Hartley, author of Knock Knock and Adult Swim ""Masterful prose and plotting, and a unique and imaginative approach to the subject, blending personal memoir, historical metafiction, and philosophical inquiry into the deepest recesses of the human soul...sobering, unsettling...but comes out-barely-on the side of a case for hope."" Janet Hulstrand, author of A Long Way From Iowa"

Author Information

SAMU�L LOPEZ-BARRANTES lives in Paris. He hosts a literary salon, teaches creative writing at the Sorbonne, and leads historical walks on modernism, existentialism, and the Nazi Occupation of Paris. *The Requisitions* is Samu�l Lopez-Barrantes' second novel. His first, Slim and The Beast (Inkshares, 2015), is a coming-of-age story about the pursuit of passion that follows a college basketball player and a war veteran in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

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