ISOLARII 15: MOTHERDYING

Michael Lentz is a saxophonist, composer, and one of Germany’s most radical writers. When his mother was dying, language fell apart. In MOTHERDYING, words splinter and fuse; grammar buckles under what it must bear. Memory arrives without warning: a child watching flies in fresh paint; a father unboxing hidden love letters; a woman turning from the hospital window. No explanation—just the way memory works at the edge of life: everything at once, nothing in order. Winner of the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize—the German language’s most vital award for new writing—Muttersterben (MOTHERDYING) broke with the platitudes of mourning. It proved a scream doesn’t signify pain; it is pain. For an age struggling to speak loss, this is more than a novel—it’s a lexicon for the unsayable, insisting that every death matters and every absence merits its own broken language. ISOLARII is a publishing house founded in 2020 by Sebastian Clark and India Ennenga, publishing politically and culturally engaged works in a unique miniature format, the size of the palm of your hand. Taking note of the upheavals and turbulence of our times, ISOLARII (which takes its name from the Renaissance genre of “island books”) aims to preserve or bring forth islands of singular thought, forming together an “archipelago of today's avant-garde movements and figures.”