'Meyer's multifaceted prose, studded with allusions to both high and popular culture, and superbly translated by Katy Derbyshire, is musical and often lyrical, elevating lowbrow punning and porn-speak into literary devices. [ Bricks and Mortar ] is admirably ambitious and in many places brilliant - a book that not only adapts an arsenal of modernist techniques for the twenty-first century but, more importantly, reveals their enduring poetic potential.' -- Anna Katharina Schaffner, Times Literary Supplement 'A journey to the end of the night for 20/21st century Germany. Meyer reworks Döblin and Céline into a modern epic prose film with endless tracking shots of the gash of urban life, bought flesh and the financial transaction (the business of sex); memory as unspooling corrupted tape; journeys as migrations, as random as history and its splittings. A shimmering cast threatens to fly from the page, leaving only a revenant's dream - sky, weather, lights-on-nobody-home, buried bodies, night rain. What new prose should be and rarely is; Meyer rewrites the rules to produce a great hallucinatory channel-surfer of a novel.' -- Chris Petit, author of Robinson 'The point of Im Stein [ Bricks and Mortar ] is that nothing's "in stone": Clemens Meyer's novel reads like a shifty, corrupted collocation of .docs, lifted off the laptop of a master genre-ist and self-reviser.

It's required reading for fans of the Great Wolfgangs (Hilbig and Koeppen), and anyone interested in casual gunplay, drug use, or sex.' -- Joshua Cohen, author of Book of Numbers 'This is a wonderfully insightful, frank, exciting and heart-breaking read. Bricks and Mortar is like diving into a Force 10 gale of reality, full of strange voices, terrible events and a vision of neoliberal capitalism that is chillingly accurate.' -- A. L. Kennedy, author of Serious Sweet.