The Next 100 Books

Legendary filmmaker and celebrated author Werner Herzog tells in his inimitable voice the story of his epic artistic career in a long-awaited memoir that is as inventive and daring as anything he has done before.

Werner Herzog was born in September 1942 in Munich, Germany, at a turning point in the Second World War. Soon Germany would be defeated and a new world would have to be made out the rubble and horrors of the war. Fleeing the Allied bombing raids, Herzog’s mother took him and his older brother to a remote, rustic part of Bavaria where he would spend much of his childhood hungry, without running water, in deep poverty. It was there, as the new postwar order was emerging, that one of the most visionary filmmakers of the next seven decades was formed.

Until age 11, Herzog did not even know of the existence of cinema. His interest in films began at age 15, but since no one was willing to finance them, he worked the night shift as a welder in a steel factory. He started to travel on foot. He made his first phone call at age 17, and his first film in 1961 at age 19. The wildly productive working life that followed—spanning the seven continents and encompassing both documentary and fiction—was an adventure as grand and otherworldly as any depicted in his many classic films.

Every Man for Himself and God Against All is at once a personal record of one of the great and self-invented lives of our time, and a singular literary masterpiece that will enthrall fans old and new alike. In a hypnotic swirl of memory, Herzog untangles and relives his most important experiences and inspirations, telling his story for the first and only time.

A “linguist-traveler” arrives by plane to Ravicka, a city of yellow air in which an undefined crisis is causing the inhabitants to flee. Although fluent in the native language, she quickly finds herself on the outside of every experience. Things happen to her, events transpire, but it is as if the city itself, the performance of life there, eludes her. Setting out to uncover the source of the city’s erosion, she is beset by this other crisis—an ontological crisis—as she struggles to retain a sense of what is happening.

Event Factory is the first in a series of novels (also available are the second, The Ravickians; the third, Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge; and the fourth, Houses of Ravicka) that Renee Gladman is writing about the invented city-state of Ravicka, a foreign “other” place fraught with the crises of American urban experience, not least the fundamental problem of how to move through the world at all.

Neoliberals should have seen the end of the Cold War as a total victory—but they didn’t. Instead, they saw the chameleon of communism changing colors from red to green. The poison of civil rights, feminism, and environmentalism ran through the veins of the body politic and they needed an antidote.

To defy demands for equality, many neoliberals turned to nature. Race, intelligence, territory, and precious metal would be bulwarks against progressive politics. Reading and misreading the writings of their sages, Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, they articulated a philosophy of three hards—hardwired human nature, hard borders, and hard money—and forged the alliances with racial psychologists, neoconfederates, ethnonationalists, and goldbugs that would become known as the alt-right.

Following Hayek’s bastards from Murray Rothbard to Charles Murray to Javier Milei, we find that key strains of the Far Right emerged within the neoliberal intellectual movement not against it. What has been reported as an ideological backlash against neoliberal globalization in recent years is often more of a frontlash. This history of ideas shows us that the reported clash of opposites is more like a family feud.

Garielle Lutz, "a writers' writers' writer,” is considered a master of the sentence and untranslatable from English. Worsted is a collection of 14 new stories, and Partial List is an older work that now contains the classic essay "The Sentence Is a Lonely Place," which was delivered as a lecture at Columbia in 2008.

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“Garielle Lutz is a master of the art of American English. Her stories are disruptive, heartbreaking, peculiar, sharp, and staggeringly beautiful. They are crystalline and dangerous, diamonds that can gouge your eyes out. Her work has inspired a movement in literature that is religious in its precision and weirdness; she has solved the literary quandary of illustrating the vulnerabilities of human nature and relational dissonance with true feeling and no sentimentality. I could read her stories all day and all night. Each story in this collection is a song that ruins me in its oblique precision and resolve. She is an American treasure. “ --Ottessa Moshfegh

"What you often hear about Garielle Lutz is that she writes astonishing sentences. I think that's true. I also think it undersells the brilliance of what Lutz does. The insanely tight, compressed sentences build into insanely tight, compressed stories that show us what America and contemporary life can feel like, at their darkest core. Garielle Lutz is a master—living proof that, even in our cliche-ridden, denial-drenched, hype-driven age, true originality is still an American possiblity." — George Saunders

"Garielle Lutz is a revolutionary force in American writing, reinventing prose fiction with sentences that always deliver on their extravagant promises. Her new collection is even stronger and funnier than her first, a feat I'd presumed impossible. Lutz's stories reside at the messy, linty, futile core of everything - and she's there, too, at first a tiny figure, waving demurely, but then the nearer we get to truth, the larger Garielle Lutz looms, godsome." — Sam Lipsyte

"Lutz is a master prose stylist. . . . Lutz succeeds where so many other language-obsessed writers fail, because her narratives rise beyond the lexical tricks of which they’re composed. Give yourself over to the contorted logic of this book and you come away lugubrious yet exuberant, having lived for a time in a reality at once shattered and inspired. . . . her work gathers a remarkable strength, allowing her to battle convention and win."—Bookforum

“Garielle Lutz is a sentence writer from another planet, deploying language with unmatched invention. She is not just an original literary artist, but maybe the only one to so strenuously reject the training wheels limiting American narrative practice. What results are stories nearly too good to read: crushingly sad, odd, and awe-inspiring.” —Ben Marcus

"Lutz's protagonists are, typically, obsessive catalogers of life's minutiae, going through the motions at vaguely delineated jobs, baffled by life, between relationships and wondering, as one puts it, 'at what point people become environments for one another to enter.'"—Kirkus Reviews

“Lutz has been called an experimental writer—but that’s possibly too arid a label for someone whose readers may find themselves taking both prolonged emotional and intellectual journeys. . . . [M]uch of Lutz’s writing makes use of the Zen habit of forcing paradoxical statements together, to drive the mind towards profound realizations.” — The Independent

“. . . Lutz displays an innate understanding of the grim compromises of modern life but heightens and glorifies these with her dizzying language. She refuses to let the dreary world force her to write a dreary sentence.” — Paris Review

"... charged with humor, humiliation, odd sexual currents, koanlike thought patterns and an artfully gnarled syntax."—Time Out New York

"It should be enough to say that every sentence briefly brings something true to new expression: some black shape moving underwater."—David Winters/3:AM Magazine