Dorothy, a publishing project

Winner of the aspekte Prize, the most prestigious German prize for debut fiction, Swiss playwright and visual artist Ariane Koch’s Overstaying is an absurdist tour de force.

“I don’t see my writing as chronological or classically narrative, but as spatial—a kind of architecture. I keep adding rooms, and readers can take different paths through the rooms,” writes Ariane Koch of Overstaying, her anarchically comic debut. Koch’s narrator is an impudent young woman, a contemporary Bartleby living alone in her parents’ old house in the small hometown she hates but can’t bring herself to leave. When a visitor turns up, promisingly new, she takes him in, and instantly her life revolves around him. Yet it is hard to tell what, exactly, this visitor is. A mooch, a lover, an absence, a presence—possibly a pet? Mostly, he is a set of contradictions, an occasion for Koch’s wild imagination to take readers in brilliant and unexpected directions.

This publication is made possible through generous support from the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia.

*

Read an excerpt from Overstaying at Lit Hub.

*

“Overstaying has the makings of a classic.” Die Zeit

“Overstaying amazed me.” Jonathan Lethem

“Overstaying is a short novel of huge ambition. Much of its beauty lies in its arresting use of language, the unruly juxtaposition of images that ought not to cohere but somehow do, jolting us from our complacency towards a more vital understanding of the world. Damion Searls’s translation from the Swiss German is lucid and precise. . . . Hypnotic and masterly, this is a book that creates its own world, forcing us to look at our own through altered eyes.” Nina Allan, Times Literary Supplement

“Ms. Koch, a German-language Swiss author, writes with a refreshing taste for the absurd . . . [and] a keen sense of irony.” Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal

“In Swiss writer Koch’s bewitching debut, a woman’s isolated existence is upended by the arrival of a strange being. . . . Fans of dreamy and mysterious fiction like Claire-Louise Bennett’s Pond will devour this.” Publishers Weekly

“Overstaying is a pinch of Dostoevsky’s neuroses, a little Beckett-ish in its absurdity, Sapphic in the generous white spaces between vignettes, and as easy to swallow as applesauce. If you’re looking for a reason to let your hair down, and you’re willing to lose your mind a little, step into a book that conducts itself like freeform jazz.” Kat Chen, Conde Nast Traveller

“Koch’s astutely absurd text underscores just how permeable a self is, and how rife with little deaths and rebirths it is.” Cassie Packard, Frieze

“[A] bizarre and beautiful psychodrama about hospitality, control, and domination . . . Koch’s novel seems to take place half in the ‘real world’ and half in a Leonora Carrington painting . . . Novels like this aren’t about plot, per se, but Koch develops such an engaging offbeat dynamic, and ends each short chapter on such a deliciously provocative flourish—aided by Damion Searls’s supple translation—that you race through, desperate to find out the next small act of cruelty of indignity.” Luke Kennard, The Telegraph

“With an astounding understanding of what it’s like to be stuck in arrested development in a world that seems to favor it, Koch gives us an unlikeable protagonist we can relate to.” Donna Vatnick, The Millions

“Koch is a Swiss playwright and visual artist, and her debut novel is a slim, dreamlike, and bizarre—in short, a perfect escape from all you’re looking to escape.” Lit Hub, “Most Anticipated”

“The tale is uncanny, bizarre and outlandish, delivered with such charm and wry humour that this brilliant slim book is utterly captivating.” The Berliner

“Swiss playwright/visual artist Ariane Koch’s zany first novel, Overstaying (adroitly translated from the German by Damion Searls) stuck me as a wonderfully entertaining update [to Max Frisch’s Biedermann und die Brandstifter]. This is an exercise in tragic-comic absurdism squared.” Bill Marx, The Arts Fuse

“So many novels have been written about immigration . . . that you might think there’s nothing more to say. But then you read Overstaying by Ariane Koch. A winner of Germany’s Aspekte Literature Prize and a Swiss Literature Prize in its original German, the novel takes these themes and transforms them into a strange, brilliant fever dream.” Niamh Donnelly, Financial Times

“Overstaying has a lot to say about housing—not in a particularly consistent or dogmatic way, but in a fumbling, ambivalent, and artistic one. It’s the tale of a home gone stale and, more largely and critically, of housing precarity and the moral rot that comes from wielding the privilege of property over others.” Walker Rutter-Bowman, The Baffler

“[Overstaying] both welcomes and distances the reader, which is a rare feat and may be why the book won prizes in Germany and in Koch’s home country of Switzerland. If there’s any justice, it should do the same here.” John Self, The Critic

“Like in the dollhouse dreamworlds of Edward Hopper, the spirits inhabiting Koch’s small town are waiting around for nothingness.  We follow them down winding tangents, delighting in their absurd and humorous struggles with the strange physics of their local reality. Koch’s cerebral observations about intimacy are somehow both comforting and unfamiliar, with a subtle existential violence lurking underneath her wide-eyed prose. Koch’s world sticks its tongue out at us every time we look away.” Adam Green

“A brave debut, remarkable in its literary aesthetics.” Christian Metz, Deutschlandfunk

“In Koch’s light, precise and yet dreamlike language, scenes emerge that—as in the theater of the absurd—seem at first to make no sense at all and then a tremendous amount of sense. Derrida, writing about hospitality, stated that absolute hospitality means opening one’s home: to give place not only to the stranger, but also to the unknown, to the other, without expecting reciprocity. Koch skillfully varies this postmodern utopia of opening oneself to the unknown in her impressive literary debut.” aspekte Prize Committee

“An engaging and agreeably discomfiting read.” Michael Orthofer, The Complete Review

“You’ll enjoy residing in this strange edifice . . . [Koch’s] isolated house-dweller offers more than enough spicy provocation, clever turns, and humorous observation to keep us engaged and wondering.” Ron Slate, On the Seawall

“All the wisdom and beauty it has to offer are irreverently packaged and left on your doorstep without a note. The more I flip back through the book, the harder it gets to summarize, and the better I like it.” Devon Halliday, Barrelhouse

*