Berlingeles

by Stefan Kiesbye

Berlingeles reads like an episode of Black Mirror, as conceived by Kafka. Echoes of the past collide with a nightmarish future, set forth in elegant, compulsive prose.
-- Meg Howrey, author of The Wanderers In a dystopian future, Los Angeles has been walled-in, Berlin-style, and Gaz, a rising member of the city's most notorious street gang finds himself pitted against our 96-year-old protagonist, K. Seeking a way out of this hellish maze of sweeping slums, waves of violence, and little hope, Gaz might just have found his path to salvation, while the underworld hangs on the prophecies of blind prophet Gerut, and the rest of the lost city still smolders in the ashes of a civil war. Berlingeles brings the future into sharp Gibsonian focus, constructs Dickian landscapes, and brings forth a haunting vision of what lies just beyond our world gone awry. Stefan Kiesbye has been hailed as the inventor of the modern German gothic novel, and with his new novel, he gives us cyberpunk as only he can.

Genres: Fiction, Science Fiction

280 pages, Paperback

Published June 6, 2018

About the author

Stefan Kiesbye has an MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan. Born on the German coast of the Baltic Sea, he moved to Berlin in the early 1980s. He studied drama and worked in radio before starting a degree in American studies, English, and comparative literature at Berlin’s Free University. A scholarship brought him to Buffalo, New York, in 1996. Kiesbye now lives in Portales, NM, where he teaches Creative Writing at Eastern New Mexico University. His stories and poems have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, and his first book, Next Door Lived a Girl, won the Low Fidelity Press Novella Award.

Reviews

[Melki · Rating 4 out of 5]

Every day is a weapon that can strike you down.

Kiesbye's books are always disturbing, but this one stretches the limits of the old distress-o-meter.

In a heavily divided United States, there are unlikable characters doing nasty things to one another, and too many trigger warnings to list.

This is one of those books that grabs you by the throat and shakes you until your brain rattles

I can't say I liked it, but this author is always worth a read.

Recommended only for the adventurous and stout of heart

[Daniel Polansky]

Tales from a post-apocalyptic LA. I dug it, Kiesbye has some nastiness to him and some feel for LA as a place.

[The Literary Chick · Rating 5 out of 5]

An Interview with Stefan Kiesbye on Berlingeles in The Los Angeles Review of Books blog - https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/inte...