Description
The Threshold and the Ledger by Tom McCarthy will be published on the 9th September 2025 – available to pre-order now. Orders will be despatched a few days before publication date.
The Threshold and the Ledger is a timely exploration of Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann by Booker-shortlisted author Tom McCarthy.
Since her untimely death in 1973, Ingeborg Bachmann has come to be regarded as one of the twentieth century’s most important writers. Unpacking a single Bachmann poem, novelist Tom McCarthy latches onto two of its central terms — the eponymous threshold and ledger — and takes off on a line of flight: through the work of Franz Kafka, David Lynch, Anne Carson, Sappho and Shakespeare.
Can writing be understood as an experience of the threshold, a limit- or boundary- state? A condition of ecstasy or ec-stasis, standing outside of oneself? With identity ruptured and surpassed, how – and by whom – might such experience be recorded?
Appearing on the eve of Bachmann’s centenary year, McCarthy’s book argues for the centrality of her vision to the very act of literature itself.
Reviews
There are no reviews yet.