Star 111

Series: New York Review Books
ISBN: 9781681378534
Pages: 496
Publication Date: October 1, 2024

A rich, vivid tale about new beginnings and fractured utopias.
—Ángel Gurría-Quintana, Financial Times "A Best Book of 2023, Fiction in Translation (UK Edition)

These days, it’s hard to envision what Seiler’s translator, Tess Lewis, calls “the heady atmosphere of hope and disorientation” that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall. Luckily, Seiler’s STAR 111 brings it all vividly back.
— Alida Becker, The New York Times Books Review 

The fragmentary style of Star 111 recalls much of the later work of Grass [...] The great ingenuity of Seiler’s narrative lies in the displacement that it effects between Carl’s exploits and those of his distant parents, from whom he receives regular letters written in a floridly formal style.
—Stuart Walton, The Hong Kong Review of Books

The author’s shimmering, ironic and musical prose—impeccably translated by Tess Lewis—captures a moment both archaic and profoundly real. Utopian and matter-of-fact, it is both timeless and obsessed with the minutiae of its time.
—Karen Leeder, Times Literary Supplement

Seiler's dry wit and command of language, which can itself be musical, keep the pages humming.
—Kirkus Reviews

There aren’t many books that can be cited as the missing link between Uwe Johnson’s Anniversaries and Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives, and still fewer that could live up to the comparison, but Lutz Seiler (with impeccable assistance from Tess Lewis) makes it look easy. Star 111 is a brilliant, immersive, sometimes funny, slyly moving book with a main character who walks through the new reality he finds himself in like an astronaut exploring alone beneath a strange, harsh, beautiful sun. A stellar achievement.
—Will Ashon

It took Lutz Seiler, born in East Germany, thirty years to give to the moment [of the Fall of the Berlin Wall] the full richness of fertile and ambiguous human experience. With its ample narrative and powerful imagination, Star 111 is the Wenderoman par excellence, the great novel of the turn, as German reunification is called.
—Christine Lecerf, Le Monde des livres

Lutz Seiler talks about a city and a time that seemed to have been exhausted in fiction. But he creates a new fascination.
—Jona Nietfeld, Der Tagesspiegel

Seiler crafts a fascinating intergenerational exploration of German reunification, as Carl comes to see his parents as people with wants and dreams like him, “as if they’d only just begun to exist.” It’s an exceptional story of fresh starts.
— Publishers Weekly

His playful language and knack for imagery light up “Star 111” as it unfolds through the beautifully captured events of everyday life. Translator Tess Lewis has done remarkable work rendering the book in language that does credit to Seiler’s poetic sensibilities and sense of rhythm.
—Bryn Stole, The Washington Post