Nietzsche's Kisses is the story of Friedrich Nietzsche's last mad night on earth. Locked in a small room on the top floor of a house in Weimar, the most radical and influential of nineteenth-century German philosophers hovers between dream and wakefulness, memory and hallucination, the first person, second, and third, past and present, reliving his brief love affair with feminist Lou Salome, his stormy association with Richard Wagner, and his conflicted relationship with Lisbeth, his radibly anti-Semitic sister. Here is an authoritative portrait of the Nietzsche we know and the Nietzsche we don't. His titantic ego, suppressed, squelched, and sealed up within him, all but unknown to his acquaintances, creates a maniacal and raging giant inside his own skull that is mysterious and unnerving. Both stylistically and formally innovative, the prose in Nietzsche's Kisses is surprising and rich. The result is a vivid, complex experience of Nietzsche's final hours.

 

Lance Olsen is the author of eighteen books of and about innovative fiction. His short stories, essays, poems, and reviews have appeared in a wide variety of journals and anthologies, including Fiction International, Iowa Review, Village Voice, Time Out, BOMB, Gulf Coast, and Best American Non-Required Reading. His novel Tonguing the Zeitgeist was a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award. A 2006 NEA Fellowship recipient, he lives with his wife, assemblage-artist Andi Olsen, somatically in the mountains of central Idaho and digitally at www.lanceolsen.com

"Nietsche's Kisses is a brilliant book and a book of brilliances, one of which follows the logic of the disintegration of a great mind with poetic grace, profound comedy, and a sense of tragic inevitability. With this novel Lance Olsen moves well beyond mere experimentalism to occupy a ground worthy of the magisterial and manic figure of Nietzsche himself. This is a deeply moving, compelling, intelligent, and utterly human account of the power of mind and the glory of post-history's first and most vulnerable superman."

—Michael Joyce

Lance Olsen's Nietzsche's Kisses has a Dionysian soul that the great philosopher would have loved. More importantly, Olsen, and the novel, understand what Nietzsche meant about the scary business of looking into the abyss."

—Percival Everett

"Kisses, tears, and laughter. Pride, embarrassment, and humiliation. Lance Olsen's beautiful novel gives us both the 'human, all too human' side of Nietzsche and the dream of lightness and grace that was central to his philosophy, but that is too often forgotten or ignored by his disciples." —Steven Shaviro