From the publisher:
A lean, seductive, and dazzlingly inventive novel that shows us the dark side of early twentieth-century Vienna.
Vienna, 1919. A mighty empire has come crashing down—and a mysterious young woman, unable to speak, has turned up on the streets. 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. The man reveals only her name: Gretel. But he encloses a bedtime story he asks the doctor to read aloud to her, about an architect whose radically modern creation has ignited a scandal. The next day a second story arrives, about a ballet master who develops a strange new position for the feet. 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—characters crossing paths in a decadent, death-obsessed, oversexed city. There are artists who ape the innocence of children and scientists who insist that children are anything but innocent. And then there’s Gretel’s own mother, who will do whatever it takes to sing onstage at the City Theater . . . Is it any wonder that this world—soon to vanish anyway in a war to end all wars—is one from which Gretel’s father wished to shelter her?
"The novel’s charming formal sequence conceals an eruptive, ungovernable force . . . Sachs is a very funny writer unafraid of italics and exclamation marks, which he marshals against the absurdity of the world." —Dustin Illingworth, The New York Times Book Review
"A sumptuous, skittish portrait of a society beset by madness and teetering on the edge of collapse . . . Gretel and the Great War functions like its own deep, dark, enchanted forest . . . A novel that’s somehow as playful as it is chilling. It’s an elegy for the past; perhaps it’s a warning for the future too." —Lucy Scholes, The Telegraph
"Fusing period atmosphere with fairy tale, Ehrlich Sachs hints at modern themes while summoning an unexpected imaginary place." —The New Yorker
"Every surprising new turn arrives with an incandescent and terrifying sense of inevitability . . . A large readership of this crazy book would make the world a safer and saner place." —Arthur Willemse, World Literature Today
"Fabulously, disturbingly smart . . . In Sachs’s novel, Kafka meets Grimm, and together, they are prodded, lauded, and overtaken by Gretel." —Sunny S. Yudkoff, Los Angeles Review of Books
"Sachs creates delightfully absurd scenarios in which reason is pushed beyond its logical conclusions with characters who waltz and pirouette into the gray area between lucidity and lunacy . . . Gretel and the Great War is a fever-dream of Vienna, the beating heart of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in the run-up to the First World War, and a distorting lens that might well help sharpen our view of our own delusions." ―Tess Lewis, The Berlin Journal
"A treasury of connected tales . . . More than an experimentalist or even a satirist, Mr. Sachs is a dedicated comic writer . . . The intricate absurdity of the stories is an end in itself." —Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal
"Gretel reads like the best of Italo Calvino’s pseudo-magical literary puzzles replete with the kind of intrigue often attributed to authors like Jesse Ball and László Krasznahorkai. Like those authors, reading Sachs can feel like getting lost in a machination set by a master architect." —Joe Stanek, Chicago Review of Books
"Sachs’s Vienna is a vibrant and petty place, full of insecure authorities and overconfident revolutionaries seeking to overturn everything established . . . Sachs is a clever, self-aware storyteller, and he draws creative tension from his ostensibly childlike narrative form." —Robert Rubsam, The Washington Post
"A glorious triumph . . . Surprising, taking twists and turns practiced readers and storytellers won't seem coming . . . Entertaining . . . Vivid . . . Important." ―Joshua M. Patton, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
"One of my greatest pleasures as a reader is discovering a weird old writer with a back catalog worth working through. Another is discovering a new writer who’s bravely doing their own thing, and then awaiting each new book from them. Since I first read Sachs in n+1 almost a decade ago, nothing of his has disappointed . . . Sachs’s fiction achieves its own kind of timeliness, reaching for deeper significance through the absurd." —Ben Roth, AGNI
"Contains the combination of precision and riotous dark humor that Sachs’s readers will recognize from his acclaimed first novel . . . Aesthetics and ethics are ingeniously entwined.” —Seth Rogoff, Rain Taxi
"No one writing today has explored the mercurial nature of the father-son relationship with more humor and fresh insight than Adam Ehrlich Sachs . . . With the publication of his third book, Gretel and the Great War, Sachs is broadening his canvas to put this core dynamic in the context of social upheaval, obsession, and, above all, legacy." ―Matthew James Seidel, The Millions
"Intricate, unexpected, and delightful . . . An ingeniously woven novel . . . Playful, charming, and brilliant—a profundity made of toylike whimsies." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Sachs knocks it out of the ballpark in this novel organized like a set of nested Russian dolls . . . Fiction lovers may experience moments of vertigo reading this metafiction, but it’s so engaging they’ll love it anyway.”—Library Journal (starred review)
"This spirited volume lingers long after the final page.” —Publishers Weekly
"Adam Ehrlich Sachs makes books that make their own traditions. This is the highest praise I know, for serious." —Joshua Cohen, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Netanyahus
"Relentless, in the best way possible. Think Mary Poppins’s satchel, think one deranged matrioshka constantly coming out from under another—Gretel and the Great War is the gift that keeps on giving. Adam Ehrlich Sachs continues to prove he is one of our most daring and original writers." —Camille Bordas, author of How to Behave in a Crowd
"Countless writers take pleasure in the style of their own sentences. Few of them provide such pleasure to their readers. Sachs provides it again and again. He doesn't let up. Plus he’s funny as hell. No writer alive is more startlingly alive." —Adam Levin, author of Mount Chicago
"His lunatics clamor to be believed, but Sachs wants something else: pin-thin-fancies that braid a rope to make your legs dance." —Jesse Ball, author of The Divers’ Game