A New Yorker Best Book of the Year "Inventive . . . Whimsical . . . Fusing period atmosphere with fairy tale, Ehrlich Sachs hints at modern themes while summoning an unexpected imaginary place." ― The New Yorker "Sachs draws from the madcap, darkly comic tradition of postmodern European fiction . . . Like Thomas Bernhard before him, Sachs is a very funny writer unafraid of italics and exclamation marks, which he marshals against the absurdity of the world." ―Dustin Illingworth, The New York Times Book Review "Adam Ehrlich Sachs continues to prove he is one of our most daring and original writers." ―Camille Bordas, author of How to Behave in a Crowd A lean, seductive, and dazzlingly inventive novel that shows us the dark side of early twentieth-century Vienna. Vienna, 1919. A once-mighty empire has finally come crashing down―and a mysterious young woman, unable to speak, has turned up on the streets. A doctor appeals to the public for information about her past and receives a single response, from a sanatorium patient who claims to be her father. The man reveals only her name: Gretel. But he encloses a bedtime story he asks the doctor to read aloud to her, about an Architect whose radically modern creation has caused a great scandal. The next day a second story arrives, about a Ballet Master who develops a new position of the feet. Twenty-four more stories follow in alphabetical order, about an Immunologist and a Jeweler, a Revolutionary and a Satirist, a Waif and an X-ray Technician and a Zionist. Crossing paths and purposes, their stories interweave until a single picture emerges, that of a decadent, death-obsessed, oversexed empire buzzing with the ideas of Freud and Karl Kraus. There are artists who ape the innocence of children, and scientists who insist that children are anything but innocent . . . And then there’s Gretel’s own mother, who will do whatever it takes to sing onstage at the City Theater. Is it any wonder that this world―soon to vanish anyway in a war to end all wars―was one from which Gretel’s father wished to shelter her? "No staid work of history, this. Sachs draws from the madcap, darkly comic tradition of postmodern European fiction to reimagine the continent’s catastrophic destiny . . . Like Thomas Bernhard before him, Sachs is a very funny writer unafraid of italics and exclamation marks, which he marshals against the absurdity of the world." ―Dustin Illingworth, The New York Times Book Review "Inventive . . . Whimsical . . . Fusing period atmosphere with fairy tale, Ehrlich Sachs hints at modern themes while summoning an unexpected imaginary place." ― The New Yorker "A work of comic and inventive excess . . . The novel becomes the perfect vessel to carry and satirize the post-rational ideas of a self-obsessed society . . . Sachs’s fascination with eccentric artists and thinkers illuminates what he values most in writing: aesthetic courage, individual style. Gretel possesses both . . . Peerless." ―Walker Rutter-Bowman, The Nation "A whirligig of uncanny fables . . . A sumptuous, skittish portrait of a society beset by madness and teetering on the edge of collapse . . . Gretel and the Great War functions like its own deep, dark, enchanted forest." ―Lucy Scholes, The Daily Telegraph "A glorious triumph . . . Surprising, taking twists and turns practiced readers and storytellers won't seem coming . . . Entertaining . . . Vivid . . . Important." ―Joshua M. Patton, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette "A sumptuous, skittish portrait of interwar Austria―a world of madness, opulence, precarity, decay and danger . . . A carousel of increasingly uncanny fairy tales that resonate with echoes of Freud’s case studies and Bruno Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment ." ― Prospect (ten best books of the year) "No one writing today has explored the mercurial nature of the father-son relationship with more humor and fresh insight than Adam Ehrlich Sachs . . . With the publication of his third book, Gretel and the Great War , Sachs is broadening his canvas to put this core dynamic in the context of social upheaval, obsession, and, above all, legacy." ―Matthew James Seidel, The Millions "One of my greatest pleasures as a reader [. . .] is discovering a new writer who’s bravely doing their own thing, and then awaiting each new book from them. Since I first read Sachs in n+1 almost a decade ago, nothing of his has disappointed . . . Sachs’s fiction achieves its own kind of timeliness, reaching for deeper significance through the absurd." ―Ben Roth, Agni "Sachs’s Vienna is a vibrant and petty place, full of insecure authorities and overconfident revolutionaries seeking to overturn everything established. . . . Sachs is a clever, self-aware storyteller, and he draws creative tension from his ostensibly childlike narrative form." ―Robert Rubsam, The Washington Post "A fabulously, disturbingly smart work . . . What keeps the reader enthralled in such an unnerv