For the Paris Review, Matthew Neill Null wonders why American presses have yet to “take up” the catalog of German novelist Maria Beig, speculating that some might see her depiction of rural life as “too pat”:
Will anyone in America give a damn about Beig? It’s hard to imagine our glittering zeitgest machine ever getting behind her, with her landscape, her women, her knowledge of the secret lives of animals born for the hatchet. Her writing, so invested in the disappearing rural world, is particular, yes, but universal.