After Midnight

Praise

Praise for After Midnight

“I cannot think of anything else that conjures up so powerfully the atmosphere of a nation turned insane.”
—Sunday Telegraph

“You can feel the creeping evil slowly infiltrate everyday existence. But this is also a love story.”
—Manchester Evening News
 
“Acerbically observed by this youthful, clever, undeceived eye….Crystalline yet acid.”
—Jewish Chronicle

“If the original Nach Mitternacht is as lively as Anthea Bell’s snappy English translation, Keun was not only a great satirist but also a great stylist. Now published for the first time in the United States, After Midnight is a sharp, vivid and uncompromising read on an impossible subject….[A] slim but important novel.”
—Shelf Awareness

“Explosive….Reading After Midnight today [still] feels dangerous. I kept turning to the copyright page, unable to believe that such a sexually and politically frank book could have been published in 1937 Germany, a time of blacklists and book burnings….Keun has an amazing gift for exposing the conflict at the heart of the average citizen, whose naivete is eventually and sometimes violently stripped away….After Midnight haunts far beyond its final page.”
—NPR.com’s “Books We Like”

“[Irmgard Keun’s] stunning works of literature are searing satires of life under the Third Reich in which fascist ideology is subtly and hilariously subverted, Nazi racism pilloried…The overwhelming power of Keun’s work lies in her surprisingly raw, witty, and resonant feminine voices.”
—Jenny McPhee, Bookslut