The Dead

"Across [The Dead], Kracht leaves clues and tracks (perhaps traps) for the readers to connect (or tumble into), eschewing certainty through deliciously stimulating ambiguity in a remarkable, elegiac, sensual, often grotesque and hilarious novel. a remarkable, elegiac, sensual, often grotesque and hilarious novel." —Jan Wilm, The Los Angeles Review of Books

"The Dead reads like a reboot of J. G. Ballard’s Crash, in a treatment by Wes Anderson, after a weekend spent binge-watching John Schlesinger’s version of The Day of the Locust. The result draws out a comically bleak but shakily ambiguous vision of the coming image-world of fascist politics and Tinseltown productions, and of how both authorized a new power of the screen in startlingly effective ways." —Eric Banks, Bookforum

"[Christian] Kracht is one of the pre-eminent German-language authors of the last twenty years . . . Like any stylist, he courts his own readership and creates his own genre. And still, there is joy [in The Dead] for everyone, prose that astonishes, personal tragedies that mar the heart, and set pieces of outstanding oddness. When one is reading Kracht, one is nowhere else." —J.W. McCormack, Longreads

"Like Cabaret, Christian Kracht’s novel The Dead . . . evokes a brightly colored burlesque Weimar period . . . balance[d] precariously between real and unreal." —Lidija Haas, Harper's Magazine

"Excellent ... some inspired moments and images." —Publishers Weekly