An abandoned construction site. Glowering pits and furnaces. A lone man in a bungalow. Widely considered to be one of the great German writers of the twentieth century, Wolfgang Hilbig’s dark visions have long held readers aloft with their musical language and uncompromising vision of the modern world. In Under the Neomoon , his debut short story collection originally published in East Germany in 1982, Hilbig’s persistent fixations—factory pits, rampant nature, and split identities—are at their most visceral and brilliant. Rendered into English by Hilbig’s longtime translator Isabel Fargo Cole, these short tales apply fluorescent language (“garlands of cast-iron flowers,” “tall dark-green water grasses”) to lives and spaces of foreclosed dreams.  An electric collection that evokes the works of Andrei Tarkovsky and Ingeborg Bachmann, Under the Neomoon is a neon-bright reminder of humanity’s folly and the importance of storytelling from down below, where the workers toil. “Hilbig’s stories are part working-class memoir and part gothic fiction, lyrical and unsettling, verging at times on Lovecraftian pulp horror—a genre, alongside American Westerns, that he eagerly consumed in his youth. The stories in Under the Neomoon, which range from two-page flash pieces to a nearly novella-length work, showcase both ends of this genre spectrum.”  —Los Angeles Review of Books  “Work and nature wrestle everywhere in these stories…the simplest turns of phrase delight” —Kirkus Reviews “Radiant…Hilbig’s bold lyricism stands out, as does his textured portrait of an artist’s disillusionment with East German communism. It’s a valuable time capsule.”  —Publishers Weekly  Praise for Wolfgang Hilbig  “Comic and terrifying and profound.”  —Rachel Kushner, The Guardian (Best Books of 2021)  “Hilbig’s was among the most significant prose and poetry written not just in the GDR but in all of postwar Germany—East or West.”  —Joshua Cohen, author of The Netanyahus   “­Evokes the luminous prose of W.G. Sebald.”  —The New York Times  “[Hilbig writes as] Edgar Allan Poe could have written if he had been born in Communist East Germany.”  —Los Angeles Review of Books  “Wolfgang Hilbig is an artist of immense stature.”  —László Krasznahorkai, author of Satantango  Wolfgang Hilbig   (1941–2007) was one of the major German writers to emerge in the postwar era. Though raised in East Germany, he proved so troublesome to the authorities that in 1985 he was granted permission to emigrate west. The author of over 20 books, he received virtually all of Germany’s major literary prizes, capped by the 2002 Georg Büchner Prize, Germany’s highest literary honor. Isabel Fargo Cole is a U.S.-born, Berlin-based writer and translator. Her translations include  Boys and Murderers  by Hermann Ungar (Twisted Spoon Press, 2006),  All the Roads Are Open  by Annemarie Schwarzenbach (Seagull Books, 2011),  The Jew Car  by Franz Fühmann (Seagull Books, 2013), and five other books by Wolfgang Hilbig for Two Lines Press. The recipient of a prestigious PEN/Heim Translation Grant, she is the initiator and co-editor of No-mans-land.org, an online magazine for new German literature in English. The grass was pleasantly warm and damp, the sun shone in my eyes, and blinking, already nearly insensate, I felt sleep draw near. – Let the devil go into town, I thought, let the devil go be mollified by the security of town. – That thought mollified me, my need for sleep was so strong, my body feather-light, I knew I was really already sleeping, yet I could rise at any moment and go back to the mill, my feet just grazing the tips of the grass, borne by sun-warmth and sleep, and before falling sound asleep I argued: what am I supposed to do in town, hunkered in my lodgings, paying rent, paying taxes, gobbling food, guzzling drink, living like other people, forgetting, spending all my time forgetting, sitting in my chair forgetting, staring out the window at the forgotten street, until I can hardly get up from my forgotten chair to strangle myself with my neckties. Am I supposed to make people’s acquaintance there, people whose friendliness sickens me. Am I supposed to work there, work, work, work. How dreary, how pathetic to work. How degraded to get haircuts, to shave, how miserable to wash and dress according to the fashion. How sad to be healthy and sound, placid, forgetful, how tiresome, how tiresome to know what country I live in, and know it without wrath, and have to hold this always and without wrath in my dreary consciousness. –