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.

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

“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

“[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

“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

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

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