Steve Weiner's debut novel, The Museum of Love, was met with extraordinary praise that called up comparisons to "the delirious raw immediacy of the novels of C‚line, Burroughs, & Genet & the cinematic disjunctions of Kronenberg & Lynch." (Los Angeles Times Book Review) His extraordinary new novel, moodily operatic in tone & by turns hallucinatory & brilliantly detailed, follows the trajectories of four sailors & the owner of a German merchant ship, Yellow Sailor, which sets sail from Bremen in 1914. After the ship wrecks in shallow water, the men drift their separate ways, with each man's journey across a desolate wartime European landscape becoming an exploration of the failure of love, sex, religion, & friendship. Julius Bernai, owner of the ship & frankly homosexual, checks into an institute for nervous disorders & falls in love with the doctor's fiancee. Nicholas Bremml drifts: from the beds of numerous prostitutes to an oil tanker called Erwartung--Expectation--to Prague's Jewish market, where he sells magic spells. Brothers Karl & Alois are equally rudderless, & Jacek, the electrician, goes to work in the mines, where his love advice to a fourteen year old Polish boy precipitates a macabre murder. Elegantly grotesque & baroquely compelling, The Yellow Sailor is a chiaroscuroed search for love, dimly & briefly lit by flashes of hope, until gorgeous hallucinations beckoning with a seductive nothingness overwhelm the bleak & tentative future.