The Director by Daniel Kehlmann
An artist's life, a pact with the devil, a novel about the dangerous illusions of the silver screen.
A wonderful book about complicity and the complicity of artIt's also funny, and brilliant. -- ZADIE SMITH, author of The Fraud, via the Ezra Klein Show
Daniel Kehlmann is shockingly brilliant, a writer of extraordinary range and grace. At times absurdist, at times horrifyingly realist, The Director asks where the moral duty of the artist resides, and how the narcissism of the artistic project can bleed into complicity. -- Lauren Groff, author of The Vaster Wilds
The Director is engrossing and luminous, an epic act of historical imagination and an intimate parable about moral compromise and the seductions of art. After Tyll, I wasn't sure how Kehlmann could possibly top himself. He has. This book is a marvel. * Ayad Akhtar *
Daniel Kehlmann, the finest German writer of his generation, takes on the life of the eminent film director G. W. Pabst to weave a tragicomic historical fantasia that stretches from Hollywood to Nazi Germany, from Garbo to Goebbels, to show how even a great artist can make, and be unmade by, moral compromises with evil. A dazzling performance and a real page turner. * Salman Rushdie *
An incomparably accomplished and inventive piece of fiction by one of the most intelligent novelists at work today. * Jeffrey Eugenides, author of Middlesex *
Clear-eyed and propulsive . . . a searing look at the mechanics of complicity * Publishers Weekly *
Smartly entertaining...a marvelous performance - not only supple, horrifying and mordantly droll, but fluidly translated and absolutely convincing * The New York Times *
Engrossing . . . lands in the United States at a good time . . . With a page-turning narrative that is both technically sophisticated and intellectually engaging, The Director sits at the charmed intersection of commercial and literary fiction * Julia M. Klein, Los Angeles Times *
Daniel Kehlmann has produced a subtle, often darkly funny novel about the relationship between art and power as exemplified by a brilliant man who loses his way in a moral maze * Sunday Times (Pick of the Month) *
Daniel Kehlmann's engrossing seventh novel, The Director, proves his mastery of the historical form in reconceiving the life of G. W. Pabst. * The Telegraph *
A compelling narrative . . . that combines darkness and humour as it traces Pabst's descent into ever nastier places as he chases cinematic glory * Financial Times *
Exhilarating . . . a complex entertainment - a sorrowful fable of artistic and moral collapse, but also a novel composed with entrancing freedom, even bravura . . .[by] the leading German novelist of his generation . . . an irrepressible trickster, an endlessly fertile maker of fictional modes. * New Yorker *
Daniel Kehlmann is shockingly brilliant, a writer of extraordinary range and grace. At times absurdist, at times horrifyingly realist, The Director asks where the moral duty of the artist resides, and how the narcissism of the artistic project can bleed into complicity. -- Lauren Groff, author of The Vaster Wilds
The Director is engrossing and luminous, an epic act of historical imagination and an intimate parable about moral compromise and the seductions of art. After Tyll, I wasn't sure how Kehlmann could possibly top himself. He has. This book is a marvel. * Ayad Akhtar *
Daniel Kehlmann, the finest German writer of his generation, takes on the life of the eminent film director G. W. Pabst to weave a tragicomic historical fantasia that stretches from Hollywood to Nazi Germany, from Garbo to Goebbels, to show how even a great artist can make, and be unmade by, moral compromises with evil. A dazzling performance and a real page turner. * Salman Rushdie *
An incomparably accomplished and inventive piece of fiction by one of the most intelligent novelists at work today. * Jeffrey Eugenides, author of Middlesex *
Clear-eyed and propulsive . . . a searing look at the mechanics of complicity * Publishers Weekly *
Smartly entertaining...a marvelous performance - not only supple, horrifying and mordantly droll, but fluidly translated and absolutely convincing * The New York Times *
Engrossing . . . lands in the United States at a good time . . . With a page-turning narrative that is both technically sophisticated and intellectually engaging, The Director sits at the charmed intersection of commercial and literary fiction * Julia M. Klein, Los Angeles Times *
Daniel Kehlmann has produced a subtle, often darkly funny novel about the relationship between art and power as exemplified by a brilliant man who loses his way in a moral maze * Sunday Times (Pick of the Month) *
Daniel Kehlmann's engrossing seventh novel, The Director, proves his mastery of the historical form in reconceiving the life of G. W. Pabst. * The Telegraph *
A compelling narrative . . . that combines darkness and humour as it traces Pabst's descent into ever nastier places as he chases cinematic glory * Financial Times *
Exhilarating . . . a complex entertainment - a sorrowful fable of artistic and moral collapse, but also a novel composed with entrancing freedom, even bravura . . .[by] the leading German novelist of his generation . . . an irrepressible trickster, an endlessly fertile maker of fictional modes. * New Yorker *
Daniel Kehlmann was born in Munich in 1975 and lives in Vienna, Berlin and New York. He has published six novels: Measuring the World, Me & Kaminski, Fame, F, You Should Have Left and Tyll and has won numerous prizes, including the Candide Prize, the Literature Prize of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, the Doderer Prize, The Kleist Prize, the WELT Literature Prize, and the Thomas Mann Prize. Measuring the World was translated into more than forty languages and is one of the biggest successes in post-war German literature. Ross Benjamin is a prizewinning translator and writes literary criticism for The Times Literary Supplement, among other publications. He was a Fulbright Scholar and a Guggenheim Fellow and graduated from Vassar college. He lives in New York.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9781529435115 |
| ISBN 10 | 1529435110 |
| Title | The Director |
| Author | Daniel Kehlmann |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Hardback |
| Publisher | Quercus Publishing |
| Year published | 2025-05-22 |
| Number of pages | 352 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |