Not a Novel | Granta

  • Published: 05/11/2020
  • ISBN: 9781783786107
  • Granta Books
  • 208 pages

Not a Novel

Jenny Erpenbeck

Not a Novel gathers together the best of Jenny Erpenbeck’s non-fiction. Drawing from her 25 years of thinking and writing, the book plots a journey through the works and subjects that have inspired and influenced her. Written with the same clarity and insight that characterize her fiction, the pieces range from literary criticism and reflections on Germany’s history, to the autobiographical essays where Erpenbeck forgoes the literary cloak to write from a deeply personal perspective about life and politics, hope and despair, and the role of the writer in grappling with these forces.

Here we see one of the most searching of European writers reckoning with her country’s divided past in all its complexity, and responding to the world today with insight, intelligence and humanity.

The most profound, intelligent, humane, and important writer of our times... This is real literature: alive, vital, necessary, witty, beautiful, transformative

Neel Mukherjee

Fearless, playful, incisive. Erpenbeck is unique

Rachel Seiffert

One of Europe's most highly regarded writers, perpetually striving to create an artistic prism through which to interpret history's arc...

Catherine Taylor, Financial Times

The Author

Jenny Erpenbeck is the author of The Old Child & The Book of Words (2008), Visitation (2010) and The End of Days (2014, winner of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize), and Go, Went, Gone (2017). as well as Not a Novel: Collected Writings and Reflections (2020). Her work is translated into over thirty languages.

More about the author →

From the Same Author

Jenny Erpenbeck on Granta.com

Essays & Memoir | Granta 152

Open Bookkeeping

Jenny Erpenbeck

‘I write an obituary that appears in the newspaper that she always used to read while drinking her afternoon tea. I receive €170.03 for the obituary.’
Translated from the German by Kurt Beals.