Fiction. Bilingual Edition. Translated from the German by Peter Smith. A Beckettian character, who may or may not be trapped in a room with four baskets full of infants, focuses obsessively on a single sentence--"I fuck babies." This virtuoso text by Swiss experimental writer Urs Allemann won the prestigious Ingeborg Bachmann Preis des Landes Kaernten in 1991 and caused one of the biggest literary scandals in the post-1945 German-speaking world. Translated now for the first time in a new bilingual edition with an introduction by translator Peter Smith and an afterword by Vanessa Place, BABYFUCKER belongs in the canon of twentieth-century provocations that includes Bataille's The Story of the Eye, Delany's Hogg, and Cooper's Frisk. For BABYFUCKER is, as Dennis Cooper says: "a stunning, exquisite, perfect, and difficult little benchmark of a novel that makes literature that predates it seem deprived."

Author Hometown: Bettingen SWI



About the author: Urs Allemann was born in the city of Schlieren, near Zurich, Switzerland, in 1948. From 1986 to 2004 he directed the section of culture and literature of the Swiss journal of Basle (Basler Zeitung). He has published three books of narrative and several works of poetry, including: Fuzzhase, Poems (1988), Holder die Polder (2001), Schoen, Schoen! (2003), and Im Kinde Schwirren die Ahnen (2008). He currently lives in Bettingen in Basle.

Reviews:
http://denniscooper-theweaklings.blogspot.com/2009/11/four-books-i-read-recently-and-loved.html
http://bigother.com/2009/11/23/what-you-read-what-i-read-part-ii/