Rainald Goetz, born in 1954 in Munich, studied History and Medicine in Munich and obtained a doctoral degree in both subjects. He briefly worked as a doctor, but quit this profession for the sake of literature in his early thirties. His first novel, Insane, was published in 1983. In 1998, Goetz wrote the internet diary ‘Rubbish for Everyone’, probably the first literary blog in Germany, with entries on the world of media and consumerism. It was published in book form in 1999 and together with Rave, Jeff Koons, Celebration and Deconspiration belongs to This Morning, his great history of the present. Goetz has been awarded numerous prizes, most notably the Georg Büchner Prize in 2015. He lives in Berlin.
Adrian Nathan West is the author of The Aesthetics of Degradation and translator of such authors as Pere Gimferrer, Juan Benet, Marianne Fritz, and Josef Winkler. His writings appear regularly in the Times Literary Supplement, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Literary Review. He lives in Spain and the United States with the cinema critic Beatriz Leal Riesco.
Adrian Nathan West is the author of The Aesthetics of Degradation (Repeater, 2016) and My Father’s Diet (And Other Stories, 2022) and the translator of thirty or so books, most from Spanish and German; his work has received numerous awards from English PEN and the Austrian Cultural Forum translation prize, and has been shortlisted for the International Booker and the National Book Award. His recent translations include Hermann Burger’s Brenner, Rainald Goetz’s Rave, and Sibylle Lacan’s A Father: Puzzle. He is also a purple belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu. His essays and literary criticism have appeared in numerous publications in print and online, including The New York Review of Books, The London Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, and The Baffler. He lives between Spain and the United States.
