Old Rendering Plant, Paperback

Called ``an artist of immense stature`` by 2015 International Man Booker Prize-winning author Laszlo Krasznahorkai, and placed alongside W.G. Sebald by The New York Times, Wolfgang Hilbig is a master of using obsessive, hypnotic prose to explore the intersections of identity, consciousness, our frail bodies, and history's darkest chapters. Now Two Lines Press presents one of his bleakest and most powerful works. One day, a boy follows the odors, oozings, and grime of a polluted creek to the rendering plant that has spewed animal refuse into it for years. He becomes obsessed with the poor creatures that are being made into soap, and in his paranoia he comes to believe that this abattoir is somehow connected to the mysterious disappearances occurring throughout the countryside. Peeling back layers of the mind, while evoking historic horrors, Hilbig here gives us a gothic testament for the silenced and the speechless. With a tone worthy of Poe and a syntax descended from Joyce, this suggestive, ambiguous, and menacing tale explores the intersection of language and history as only Hilbig can.