Castle Gripsholm

" [A] monument to the loss of faith in language and the depredations upon creativity brought about by large-scale political evil....the formal disjointedness which terror and despair evidently incited now reads as more truthful--it's certainly far more moving--than ever a more finished fiction, a more polished satire would have been." --The Observer

"The first writers that come to mind when reading Tucholsky are Nabokov and Ford... a master of the studied nonchalance of the tidily perverse." --The Times

"One of the most brilliant writers of republican Germany...Tucholsky was known and feared for his sharp wit by all his enemies in Germany. More than anyone else, he foresaw what was coming there. What his readers enjoyed as capricious fantasies of a clever satirist [were] enacted in bitter reality." --The New York Times

"The author, a polemical journalist during the last days of the Weimar Republic, chose in this, his only novel, to write about the pleasures of wine and women and the gratifications of friendship, and to do so in prose so luminous and exuberant that the bitterness of real life in the children's home seems an intrusion. He has given us characters of wit and charm, who, even though they rescue one forlorn child, are powerless against the rising tide of horror." --Publishers Weekly