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A cornerstone of Swiss modernism, at last available in English translation from one of the great German translators of our time.

When Quentin's lover announces that she's leaving him for his brother and moving to America, he replies spontaneously that he too is leaving the country: but going where? To Tahas, he improvises: "e;a city whose very name sounded exotic."e; Following through on this impulse, Quentin soon finds a job exactly where he claimed to be going . . . and with his departure from familiar Europe, finds himself aimless in a desert country equal parts dull and dreamlike, enclosed in "e;the Ring"e; to which the wealthy expatriate community is confined by its own xenophobia. Stifled within this community and alienated without, Quentin must decide what sort of life is worth living-safe and aloof, or engaged with the deprivation and even danger of what lies beyond the Ring.

Volatile Texts is Zsuzsanna Gahse's ironic and prescient meditation on a Europe that is disintegrating, yet language itself is the true subject of these prose miniatures, which are volatile because they expose language as an arbitrary construct made of interchangeable parts; however, this is also what makes the book such an exciting read.