Traumnovelle

Grant Maierhofer

forthcoming 16 April 2025

Utilizing Wittgenstein, Tarkovsky, and Arthur Schnitzler as models, Grant Maierhofer’s Traumnovelle explores history as novel, spiraling out from the incident in 1978, when Soviet physicist Anatoli Bugorski unwittingly stuck his head inside the beam of the U-70 Synchrotron particle accelerator in Protvino. In short, recursive fragments, and interview transcripts, Traumnovelle offers a prismatic view extracted from real life, a sequence of text and images documenting an obsession.

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"Grant Maierhofer may be our greatest living novelist of failure. Caught somewhere between the existential perplexities of Beckett and the ontological ones of Kafka—encompassing both of these things, somehow, in a voice that is plaintive, at times hilarious, and deeply American—he approaches something that is nearly religious in its intensity. Traumnovelle recasts the terrible story of Anatoli Bugorski, the Russian physicist who survived exposure to a proton beam from a particle accelerator, into something greater and stronger than mere tragedy, something radiant and profoundly illuminating. As with everything Maierhofer writes, it is a joy to be alive to read it." -- Matthew Specktor

"A tonically discomforting, brain-stretching, virtuosic reimagination of one man’s unprecedented horror, rendered in ultravivid, surpassingly poetic prose, Grant Maierhofer’s Traumnovelle is work of gutsy and triumphant originality." -- Garielle Lutz

"I read Grant Maierhofer’s philosophic, photonic Traumnovelle on a trans-oceanic flight, in a sheer dome of electromagnetic radiation, and it reminded me that each sentence is a dream hypothesis which, at its terminus, makes way for the next dream. We call a sequence of such luminous failures a galaxy, a line of inquiry, a novel, a life." -- Joyelle McSweeney

ISBN 978-1-916541-14-6 // Trailer