Air

It is Christian Kracht's fate to be among the last humanists, not to say humans, practising literature as the robots swarm. His Air is part saga, part simulation, which tells of how it feels and how crazy it makes you, to simultaneously hold the mythical and the virtual accountable to true and beautiful words -- Joshua Cohen
Christian Kracht is a writer we cannot do without today. Air is a transgression - a form of storytelling that reinvents storytelling itself -- Georgi Gospodinov, International Booker-winning author of Time Shelter
In Kracht's nominal realism, a dreamlike air insistently prevails. You read him for the experience of reading him. You read him and wonder -- Nell Zink, author of Sister Europe
Kracht's elegant and surprising sentences are a pleasure to read ... Air proceeds with seamless dream logic * Financial Times *
A splendidly wrong-footing blend of sci-fi and historical fiction ... delivering a thunderbolt twist to make you rethink what you've just read. Mixing an action-thriller chase romp with a brain-teasing novel of ideas, it may be the boldest attempt yet to make fiction out of our data-hungry digital age * Daily Mail *
Kracht has great fun with Air ... The prose is translucent, in a mesmerising translation by Daniel Bowles * Observer *
Ever since his era-defining debut, Christian Kracht has enjoyed a reputation as both a cult and a canonical author... Air is as enigmatic as its title * TLS *
An exploration of the role of fantasy in modern life more generally ... read it twice and Air is revealed to be a puzzle with a certain logic * The Times *
A consistently surprising work, whose mysteries send you back to the first page the moment it ends * Literary Review *
Playfully surreal ... . Kracht has taken a familiar premise - brooding creative types, bored of their own cleverness - and made it suggestively strange * Guardian *
Sublime and funny ... deserves to be his breakout book in the Anglophone world ... a satire on millennial pretensions - something like Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico - but combined with the serious philosophical fantasy of Philip Pullman or Ursula K Le Guin. It doesn't sound as though it could possibly work; but it does, and brilliantly so * Telegraph 5-star review *
Weird, messy - and yet eerily, unaccountably compelling * The New York Times *
Such raw mythmaking material ... One of the joys of Air, down to the breathy purity of its title, is its contempt for design-an easy target, but one for which Kracht has sharpened his blade. He doesn't want to be understood, and this is somehow charming * Harper's Magazine *
The author spins a stylish kind of strangeness. The writing, in Daniel Bowles's translation from the German, is glass-like and pristine, coloured by the characters' changing moods the way a window is touched by light and shadow * Wall Street Journal *
Praise for Eurotrash -- :
Astonishing and captivating -- Karl Ove Knausgaard
Quite simply a joy to read... a brilliant and unsettling reckoning with history and memory, and with the ambiguities inherent in the art of writing fiction * Sunday Times *
Not only moving and uplifting, but strangely funny * Guardian *
Deliciously disrespectful ... not only a hilariously unsettling road-trip of a novel, but also an exhilarating read * Financial Times *
Reading Christian Kracht's Eurotrash is like holding up a mirror to another mirror and admiring the infinite reflections * New Statesman *
Hilarious, unsettling and unexpectedly moving * Washington Post *
Very funny and very precisely written * TLS *