"Comic and terrifying and profound." –Rachel Kushner, The Guardian
"Translated into supple, vivid English by Isabel Fargo Cole... [Hilbig's] C. takes bitter pride in being a writer, an identity he feels the authorities long tried to deny him..." –The New York Times
"[Hilbig's narrator] is a grouch in the tradition of Thomas Bernhard, and it is a joy..." –Times Literary Supplement
"A genuinely maverick author whose distinctive literary style is marked by visions of oozing, secreting, spilling, and sweating...Call this blue-collar Gothic–a supernatural resurgence of the means of production." –The Baffler
"Harrowing...Hilbig shares Ingeborg Bachmann's penchant for extended hallucination, as well as László Krasznahorkai's prodigious descriptions of muck." –The Brooklyn Rail
"Unexpectedly gripping–an unconventional inquiry into one man's morals and sense of home....A searing trip into the recent past and into one man's inner landscape." –Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Rich in references to the German Romantic traditions of Ludwig Tieck and E.T.A. Hoffmann, Hilbig's writing has also been compared with the Gothic style of Poe. In many ways, his meandering sentences and attention to the thick mist of consciousness resemble the voice of Thomas Bernhard, though charged with a metaphysician's sense for the peculiar details of materials–his novels are littered with objects and landscapes that seem to have their own autonomous lives..... Further translations of [Hilbig's] work will doubtless continue to light up our understanding of this great artist, a writer who shaped his life and work in the tradition of the grandest of pessimisms." –Charles Prusik, Hopscotch Translation
"This is a superb portrait of a writer who has totally lost his way. ...[The Interim] may well be Hilbig's masterpiece." –The Modern Novel
"[The narrator] C's 'depressive inertia' generates a recursive tale, pivoting between drink, aimless travel, and abandonments. But in one sense, The Interim really isn't about C. at all, but rather about the underlying psyche telling this story, a mind absorbed by–and in the grip of–the grim and grimy details of C.'s peripatetic days." –Ron Slate, On the Seawall
"This engrossing work from the late Hilbig continues the author's dedication to narratives of life in a divided Germany...a wily tale, smartly told." –Publishers Weekly
"Bilious and bleakly funny, The Interim is narrated by a drunken writer who is lost between East and West in 1980's Germany, riding trains that never seem to take him to where he wants to be. He has one foot out of the door of the decaying German Democratic Republic, but he feels like an alien among the department stores and porno theaters of the capitalist West. Hilbig is one of the essential voices of the Cold War, and deserves to be as well known in the Anglophone world as Thomas Bernhard or Günter Grass. In The Interim he captures the despair and disorientation of a generation of German intellectuals who found themselves without a side to join." –Hari Kunzru, author of Red Pill
"Ideal for our fractured times, Wolfgang Hilbig's The Interim walks the tightrope of unknowing, from East to West Berlin and back again. From dispossession and displacement to capitalism and communism, Hilbig's antihero is all of us, a stranger adrift in the modern world. Wolfgang Hilbig was a visionary, each of his novels awash in prophecy." –Mark Haber, author of Reinhardt's Garden
"Hilbig's was among the most significant prose and poetry written not just in the GDR but in all of postwar Germany–East or West." –Joshua Cohen, author of Book of Numbers
"-Evokes the luminous prose of W.G. Sebald." –The New York Times
"[Hilbig writes as] Edgar Allan Poe could have written if he had been born in Communist East Germany." –Los Angeles Review of Books
"Wolfgang Hilbig is an artist of immense stature." –László Krasznahorkai, author of Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming and Satantango
"[Hilbig] could very well be the writer for our time." –Boston Review
"Whenever I read Hilbig's books . . . I am profoundly shaken. This language practically slices me open." –Clemens Meyer, author of Bricks and Mortar
