I Am the Brother of XX

A wife is suspended in a bird cage; a thirteenth-century visionary senses the foreskin of Christ on her tongue: Fleur Jaeggy’s gothic imagination knows no limits. Whether telling of mystics, tormented families or famously private writers, Jaeggy’s terse, telegraphic writing is always psychologically clear-eyed and deeply moving, always one step ahead, or to the side, of her readers’ expectations.

In this, her long-awaited return, we read of an ‘eerie maleficent calm, a brutal calm’, and recognise the timbre of a writer for whom a paradoxical world seethes with quiet violence.

Praise for Fleur Jaeggy

‘A wonderful, brilliant, savage writer.’ Susan Sontag

‘Fleur Jaeggy’s pen is an engraver’s needle depicting roots, twigs, and branches of the tree of madness—extraordinary.’ Joseph Brodsky

‘She has the enviable first glance for people and things, she harbors a mixture of distracted levity and authoritative wisdom.’ Ingeborg Bachmann

‘Small-scale, intense, and impeccably focused.’ New Yorker