This landmark collection of essays by one of the world's greatest living authors makes Durs Grünbein's wide-ranging and multifaceted prose available in English for the first time, and is a welcome complement to Ashes for Breakfast, his first book-length collection of poetry in English. Covering two decades, The Bars of Atlantis unfurls the entire breadth and depth of Grünbein's essayistic genius. Memoiristic and autobiographical pieces that introduce Grünbein, the man and the author, and tell the story of the making of a poet and thinker toward the end of a century marked by global political strife, unprecedented human suffering, long decades of totalitarian rule, and, in its final quarter, the dawn of a new, post-Cold War world order; essays that focus on Grünbein's major philosophical and aesthetic concerns, such as the intersection of art and science, literature and biology; extended reflections on the existential, cultural, political, and ethical import of the poet's craft in the contemporary world; and, finally, explorations of the meaning of classical antiquity for the present-all contribute to making.

Durs Grünbein is the author of twelve volumes of poetry and four collections of essays. His work has been awarded many major German literary prizes, including the highest, the Georg Büchner Prize, which he won at age thirty-three. He has lived in Berlin since 1985.

I
Brief Report to an Academy
Volcano and Poem
Breaking the Body
Childhood in the Diorama
Three Miniatures
II
The Age of Deep-Sea Fish
Darwin's Eyes
III
My Babylonish Brain
To Lord Chandos: A Fax from the Future
Q as in Quotation
On the Question of Style
The Poem and Its Secret
Why Live Without Writing
Accented Time
The Bars of Atlantis
IV
Madonna and Venus
One Sunday of Life
The Vanished Square
V
A Little Blue Girl
The Thinker's Voice
The Stroke of Apollo
VI
In the Name of Extremes
A Tear for Petronius
Brother Juvenal
Between Antiquity and X
Acknowledgments