- Published: 7 November 2023
- ISBN: 9781802060997
- Imprint: Penguin Press
- Format: Paperback
- Pages: 192
- RRP: $24.99
Every Cripple a Superhero
- Published: 7 November 2023
- ISBN: 9781802060997
- Imprint: Penguin Press
- Format: Paperback
- Pages: 192
- RRP: $24.99
Powerful
SRF 2 Kultur
Explosive and moving, the book also has a real capacity to open the eyes of readers and to change attitudes
Procap Magazine
Frighteningly funny ... Every Cripple a Superhero calls for compassion and outrage
Die Tageszeitung
Ingenious ... an impressive document of life in a world of radical optimisation
Sukurier
Christoph Keller is bursting with drive, creative power and loudly audible love
literaturblatt.ch
Shocking ... Keller's humor is quiet and sophisticated, melancholic and sarcastic, wide awake and always open to the unexpectedly beautiful ... [his] book has a lightness that brings tears to your eyes
Kulturzeitschrift
An eye-opener
SRF
An unorthodox and provocative interrogation of what it means to be a person with a physical disability in the 21st century
SRF, 'Kontext' podcast
As touching as it is sobering, often painful but never tearful ... [Keller] vehemently insists on the right to participate in public life
St Galler Tagblatt
Christoph Keller describes directly and relentlessly what it means not only to be disabled, but to be disabled by defective sidewalks, by the degrading procedures involved in boarding a plane, by the demeaning response [one receives] when shopping, in museums, in restaurants, both in Switzerland and in the USA
Deutschlandfunk Kultur
Makes you sit up and take notice
Saiten Magazine
Christoph Keller is not concerned with complaints, but with making the issue of disability visible ... With literary cunning, he brings up the delicate topic in a way that is at once witty and relentlessly direct ... Every Cripple a Superhero is a socio-political appeal and at the same time a literary experiment
Blick
A skilful act of literary witness, sharp, moving and funny
Joanne Limburg, author of Letters to My Weird Sisters
What is it like to have a 'wasting' disease? In Every Cripple a Superhero, the excellence of Christoph Keller's writing is matched by its fearlessness. Precision, tragicomedy, quiet rage, elegant storytelling; every awkwardness, every frustration, every terror, every abjection is illuminated by the superpower of his style. No word or phrase is wasted in this marvellous book. And by the way, it is also a love story
Alicia Ostriker, New York State Poet Laureate 2018-2021 and author of The Volcano and After: Selected and New Poems 2002-2019
An eye-opener regarding the everyday obstacles the author has to overcome when negotiating his local environment. The passage describing the absurd, insulting, and tragi-comic experience of visiting an award-winning new building and finding the only way to enter by wheelchair is via a remote corner of the building should be compulsory reading for anyone aiming to design inclusive spaces
Laura Vaughan, Professor of Urban Form and Society, Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London
Everyone who doesn't use a wheelchair, and everyone who does, should read Christoph Keller's Every Cripple A Superhero. So many worlds exist side-by-side, yet we seldom truly enter the experience of another. Grace, strength, and humor are superpowers of extraordinary depth and stature, and Keller's slender, powerful book glows like a supernova
Jayne Anne Phillips, author of Quiet Dell and Lark and Termite
Christoph Keller ... ranks among the great Swiss writers
Neue Zürcher Zeitung
Fascinating ... [The book is] a series of snapshots, anecdotes, poems and short stories about what it is to be disabled in a world that isn't very interested in accommodating disability. This isn't an angry book, it's a very funny one ... compelling and unsettling. The tension between Keller's intellect and his physical weakness courses through the writing ...Yet his gripe is not with his own physical limitations ... Keller is asking us to consider whether it is disability that is the problem, or whether it is a society that insists on seeing people with disabilities that way
Rosie Kinchen, The Sunday Times
A defiant call to arms ... angry and funny in equal measure ... [Keller's life story is] enough to move any reader to remove dust from their proverbial eye ... moving ... Every Cripple a Superhero lingers long in the memory after its final page
Craig Campbell, Morning Star