all this here, now. | by Anna Stern
all this here, now. | by Anna Stern
Translated from German by Damion Searls
Winner of the Swiss Book Prize
Winner of the Prisma Prize for LGBTQI+ Literature
The haunting and intimate account of a group of young adults trying to come to terms with a friend’s premature death
Ananke’s death rips a huge hole in the lives of their friends. A member of the group reflects on their shared mourning, remembering times past: childhood holidays and idyllic summers, as well as tensions and arguments. Ananke is a constant, enigmatic presence, yet remains mysterious and out of reach. When the numbness of trauma becomes too much to bear, the group impulsively takes a road trip to dig up Ananke’s ashes and bring them back to the sea by the hut where Ananke used to live.
Stern’s contemplative, ethereal yet vivid prose brings heightened sensibility to the present moment and the obliquity of memory. Flouting gender pronouns and written entirely in lowercase, all this here, now. is a vision of a more collectively grounded fiction where ‘we’ is stronger than ‘I’. The effect is as meditative as it is compulsively engaging, delivered in Damion Searls’s distinctive translation.
Publication 30 May 2024
Description 216 × 138 mm, 240 pages
ISBN 978-1-915267-19-1
Design Orin Bristow
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ANNA STERN (b. 1990) works and lives in Zurich. The author of six books, Stern is the recipient of the 3sat Prize at the Ingeborg Bachmann competition in Klagenfurt and the St. Gallen Cultural Foundation award for most promising writer. Her literary work has been honoured by the City of Zurich and the Conrad Ferdinand Meyer Foundation. In 2020, Stern was awarded the Swiss Book Prize for all this here, now., which also won the 2023 Prisma Prize for LGBTQI+ Literature.
DAMION SEARLS is a translator from German, Norwegian, French, and Dutch, and a writer in English. He has translated eleven books by Jon Fosse, as well as works by Thomas Mann, Victoria Kielland, Elfriede Jelinek, and Christa Wolf, amongst others.
Praise for all this here, now.
An eddy of memory, swirling after a stone of death. Stern writes dauntlessly about loss, its ability to collapse the borders between places, people, and moments in time
– Thomas McMullan, author of The Last Good Man
A surprising book that should be read slowly, but that rewards the time you invest with a wealth of ideas
– Eva Bachmann
A beautiful, oscillating web of meaning and allusion, with glitteringly astute and flowing language depicting the interweaving of memory and the present. The title is the novel’s poetic project in miniature, in that it seeks to encapsulate the coexistence of memory and the present. The denouement of Stern’s novel, which is surprising and spectacular in equal measure, once again allows the author’s intelligent storytelling to shine through
– Beate Tröger
Anna Stern has given one of the oldest themes of literature a completely new form and an as yet unheard resonance. all this here, now. deals with the death of a loved one, and the author tells the story with great experimental power and sensuous intensity
– Swiss Book Prize Jury