Set in the aftermath 1972 Munich Olympics massacre, this darkly sophisticated literary thriller by one of Germany's most celebrated writers is now available in the US for the first time.
North Africa, 1972. While the world is reeling from the massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics, a series of mysterious events is playing out in the Sahara. Four people are murdered in a hippie commune, a suitcase full of money disappears, and a pair of unenthusiastic detectives are assigned to investigate. In the midst of it all, a man with no memory tries to evade his armed pursuers. Who are they? What do they want from him? If he could just recall his own identity he might have a chance of working it out. . . .
This darkly sophisticated literary thriller, the last novel Wolfgang Herrndorf completed before his untimely death in 2013, is, in the words of Michael Maar, “the greatest, grisliest, funniest, and wisest novel of the past decade.” Certainly no reader will ever forget it.
**
Review
"German original Wolfgang Herrndorf’s anarchic, brilliant and very funny thriller is like no other book, although it may help to think Catch-22 or even better, William Gaddis’s Carpenter’s Gothic . It must be said that Herrndorf’s dialogue stands equal to that of Gaddis and Thomas Pynchon, no mean feat, and it is masterfully rendered by translator Tim Mohr on inspired form." —Eileen Battersby, Irish Times
" Sand is a careful subversion of the crime thriller genre: no grand exposition is given, only an elegant conclusion left for careful readers." —George Berridge, Times Literary Supplement
"So dazzling and original...it is a masterpiece: at once a thriller, a surrealist comedy, and a dark satire, culminating in one of the greatest twists I’ve read." — The Daily Telegraph
"Herrndorf...writes with an arresting cinematic vividness, and there is more than a whiff of Coen brothers’ mayhem about the plot." — The Sunday Times
"A hit in Germany...part Coen bros, part John le Carré." — Sunday Star
"[Herrndorf’s] was an extraordinary mind." —Philip Ardagh, The Guardian
"A gripping and brilliantly funny thriller." — Focus
About the Author
Wolfgang Herrndorf (1965–2013) studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts, Nuremberg. After graduating, he moved to Berlin, where he worked as a magazine illustrator and posted frequently on the Internet forum Wir höflichen Paparazzi (We Polite Paparazzi). In 2001, Herrndorf joined the art and writing collective Zentrale Intelligenz Agentur, eventually contributing to their blog, Riesenmaschine (Giant Machine). He published his first novel, In Plüschgewittern (Storm of Plush), in 2002. This was followed by a collection of short stories, Diesseits des Van-Allen-Gürtels (This Side of the Van Allen Belt, 2007), which received the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize Audience Award. In early 2010, he was diagnosed with a brain tumor; his novel Tschick ( Why We Took the Car ) was published just months later and would eventually be translated into twenty-four languages. Sand was released in 2011; it was short-listed for the German Book Prize and won the Leipzig Book Fair Prize. Herrndorf committed suicide in the summer of 2013. His posts on Arbeit und Struktur (Work and Structure), the blog he started after receiving his cancer diagnosis, have been published as a book of the same name. An unfinished sequel to Tschick , Bilder einer großen Liebe (Pictures of Your True Love), was released in 2014.
Tim Mohr has translated the work of such authors as Alina Bronsky, Stefanie de Velasco, and Charlotte Roche, as well as Wolfgang Herrndorf’s novel Tschick . His own writing has appeared in The New York Times Book Review , Playboy , and New York magazine, among other publications.  His history of East German punk rock, Burning Down the Haus: Punk  Rock, Revolution, and the Fall of the Berlin Wall , will be published in September 2018.  Prior to his writing career he was a club DJ in Berlin.
Michael Maar is a literary scholar and Germanist. A member of the German Academy, he is the author of a dozen books, of which The Two Lolitas ; Speak, Nabokov ; and Bluebeard’s Chamber: Guilt and Confession in Thomas Mann have been translated into English.

upload/motw_shc_2025_10/shc/Sand - Wolfgang Herrndorf.epub

motw/Sand - Wolfgang Herrndorf.epub

lgli/Z:\Bibliotik_\34\S\%&Ovr0\Sand 2018 - Unknown.epub

zlib/no-category/Wolfgang Herrndorf/Sand_19102509.epub

Ivory Pearl

Manchette, Jean-Patrick; Nicholson-Smith, Donald; Indiana, Gary; Headline, Doug

Jean-Patrick Manchette; Donald Nicholson-Smith; Gary Indiana; Doug Headline

Herrndorf, Wolfgang; Mohr, Tim; Maar, Michael

New York Review of Books, Incorporated, The

Random House Publishing Services

NYRB Classics

Pushkin Press

New York Review Books classics, New York, 2018

United States, United States of America

Translation, 2018

London, 2017

1, 20180501

lg_fict_id_2330065

Memory of the World Librarian: outernationale

Set in the aftermath 1972 Munich Olympics massacre, this darkly sophisticated literary thriller by one of Germany's most celebrated writers is now available in the US for the first time.
North Africa, 1972. While the world is reeling from the massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics, a series of mysterious events is playing out in the Sahara. Four people are murdered in a hippie commune, a suitcase full of money disappears, and a pair of unenthusiastic detectives are assigned to investigate. In the midst of it all, a man with no memory tries to evade his armed pursuers. Who are they? What do they want from him? If he could just recall his own identity he might have a chance of working it out. . . .
This darkly sophisticated literary thriller, the last novel Wolfgang Herrndorf completed before his untimely death in 2013, is, in the words of Michael Maar, “the greatest, grisliest, funniest, and wisest novel of the past decade.” Certainly no reader will ever forget it.
**
Review
"German original Wolfgang Herrndorf’s anarchic, brilliant and very funny thriller is like no other book, although it may help to think Catch-22 or even better, William Gaddis’s Carpenter’s Gothic . It must be said that Herrndorf’s dialogue stands equal to that of Gaddis and Thomas Pynchon, no mean feat, and it is masterfully rendered by translator Tim Mohr on inspired form." —Eileen Battersby, Irish Times
" Sand is a careful subversion of the crime thriller genre: no grand exposition is given, only an elegant conclusion left for careful readers." —George Berridge, Times Literary Supplement
"So dazzling and original...it is a masterpiece: at once a thriller, a surrealist comedy, and a dark satire, culminating in one of the greatest twists I’ve read." — The Daily Telegraph
"Herrndorf...writes with an arresting cinematic vividness, and there is more than a whiff of Coen brothers’ mayhem about the plot." — The Sunday Times
"A hit in Germany...part Coen bros, part John le Carré." — Sunday Star
"[Herrndorf’s] was an extraordinary mind." —Philip Ardagh, The Guardian
"A gripping and brilliantly funny thriller." — Focus
About the Author
Wolfgang Herrndorf (1965–2013) studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts, Nuremberg. After graduating, he moved to Berlin, where he worked as a magazine illustrator and posted frequently on the Internet forum Wir höflichen Paparazzi (We Polite Paparazzi). In 2001, Herrndorf joined the art and writing collective Zentrale Intelligenz Agentur, eventually contributing to their blog, Riesenmaschine (Giant Machine). He published his first novel, In Plüschgewittern (Storm of Plush), in 2002. This was followed by a collection of short stories, Diesseits des Van-Allen-Gürtels (This Side of the Van Allen Belt, 2007), which received the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize Audience Award. In early 2010, he was diagnosed with a brain tumor; his novel Tschick ( Why We Took the Car ) was published just months later and would eventually be translated into twenty-four languages. Sand was released in 2011; it was short-listed for the German Book Prize and won the Leipzig Book Fair Prize. Herrndorf committed suicide in the summer of 2013. His posts on Arbeit und Struktur (Work and Structure), the blog he started after receiving his cancer diagnosis, have been published as a book of the same name. An unfinished sequel to Tschick , Bilder einer großen Liebe (Pictures of Your True Love), was released in 2014.
Tim Mohr has translated the work of such authors as Alina Bronsky, Stefanie de Velasco, and Charlotte Roche, as well as Wolfgang Herrndorf’s novel Tschick . His own writing has appeared in The New York Times Book Review , Playboy , and New York magazine, among other publications. His history of East German punk rock, Burning Down the Haus: Punk Rock, Revolution, and the Fall of the Berlin Wall , will be published in September 2018. Prior to his writing career he was a club DJ in Berlin.
Michael Maar is a literary scholar and Germanist. A member of the German Academy, he is the author of a dozen books, of which The Two Lolitas ; Speak, Nabokov ; and Bluebeard’s Chamber: Guilt and Confession in Thomas Mann have been translated into English.

"Set in Cuba's Sierra Maestra in the 1950s, in the days leading up to the Revolution--Manchette's unfinished masterpiece with a fearless female protagonist. Four of the ten titles in Jean-Patrick Manchette's celebrated 1970s cycle of hard-boiled novels, which the author originally dubbed neo-polars, or "neo-crime novels," have now appeared in English translation. Manchette is beginning to have a significant following among English-language readers, as witness chatter in cyberspace, favorable reviews, increasing sales, and the fact that the latest entrant, The Mad and the Bad (New York Review Books), won the 2014 French-American Foundation Translation Prize for Donald Nicholson-Smith. Ivory Pearl, aka Princesse du sang, published posthumously -and unfinished- in 1996, is considered by many French critics to be Manchette's masterpiece. In the early 1980s Manchette abandoned his attempt to "press the roman noir into the service of the social revolution" and turned his pen to other things. By the end of that decade, however, he resolved to start anew, though now working on a broader, "geopolitical" canvas. Inspiration came now less from Hammett's Red Harvest than from John Le Carre and, especially, from the works of Ross Thomas that Manchette had been translating. Sadly, Manchette's early death from cancer in 1995 put an end to this grand project. What remains, however, is Ivory Pearl, set mainly in Cuba's Sierra Maestra in the 1950s. The book will not disappoint those who admire Manchette's mastery of suspense and penchant for dauntless feminine protagonists"-- Provided by publisher

Set in Cuba's Sierra Maestra in the 1950s, in the days leading up to the Revolution--Manchette's unfinished masterpiece with a fearless female protagonist. Out of the wreckage of World War II swaggers Ivory Pearl, so named (rhymes with girl) by some British soldiers who made her their mascot, a mere kid, orphaned, survivor of God knows what, but fluent in French, English, smoking, and drinking. In Berlin, Ivy meets Samuel Farakhan, a rich closeted intelligence officer. Farakhan proposes to adopt her and help her to become the photographer she wants to be; his relationship to her will provide a certain cover for him. And she is an asset. The deal is struck... 1956: Ivy has seen every conflict the postwar world has on offer, from Vietnam to East Berlin, and has published her photographs in slick periodicals, but she is sick to death of death and bored with life and love. It’s time for a break. Ivy heads to Cuba, the Sierra Maestra. History, however, doesn’t take vacations. Ivory Pearl was Jean-Patrick Manchette’s last book, representing a new turn in his writing. It was to be the first of a series of ambitious historical thrillers about the “wrong times” we live in. Though left unfinished when Manchette died, the book, whose full plot has been filled in here from the author’s notes, is a masterpiece of bold suspense and black comedy: chilling, caustic, and perfectly choreographed.

Set in the aftermath of the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre, this darkly sophisticated literary thriller by one of Germany's most celebrated writers is now available in the US for the first time. North Africa, 1972. While the world is reeling from the massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics, a series of mysterious events is playing out in the Sahara. Four people are murdered in a hippie commune, a suitcase full of money disappears, and a pair of unenthusiastic detectives are assigned to investigate. In the midst of it all, a man with no memory tries to evade his armed pursuers. Who are they? What do they want from him? If he could just recall his own identity he might have a chance of working it out. . . . This darkly sophisticated literary thriller, the last novel Wolfgang Herrndorf completed before his untimely death in 2013, is, in the words of Michael Maar, “the greatest, grisliest, funniest, and wisest novel of the past decade.” Certainly no reader will ever forget it.

"At the same time as the Palestinian terrorist attacks during the 1972 Munich Olympics, a local man from a North African desert town is accused of breaking into an oasis commune composed largely of hedonistic Western European ex-patriots, and murdering four people. The crime has witnesses but is investigated by two bungling policemen who are tired of their monotonous roles and make only a limited effort. In the meantime, we meet a man who is ostensibly suffering from amnesia. He becomes Herrndorf's hero in Sand, as he lurches from one mishap to the next, incurring injury (both emotional and physical) at every turn in a spate of torture and threats that he cannot comprehend. Though the overarching cause of his pain, and the innumerable groups on his tracks, remain ambiguous, the reader finds truth in his hapless scrapes and existential contemplation"--New Books in German website, Oct. 29, 2012

2021-06-18