Overstaying

Winner of the most prestigious German prize for debut fiction, Swiss playwright and visual artist Ariane Koch’s Overstaying is an absurdist tour de force.

＂I don’t see my writing as chronological or classically narrative, but as spatial--a kind of architecture. I keep adding rooms, and readers can take different paths through the rooms,＂ writes Ariane Koch of Overstaying, her anarchically comic debut. Koch’s narrator is an impudent young woman, a contemporary Bartleby living alone in her parents’ old house in the small hometown she hates but can’t bring herself to leave.

When a visitor turns up, promisingly new, she takes him in, and instantly her life revolves around him. Yet it is hard to tell what, exactly, this visitor is. A mooch, a lover, an absence, a presence--possibly a pet? Mostly, he is a set of contradictions, an occasion for Koch’s wild imagination to take readers in brilliant and unexpected directions.

Ariane Koch was born in Basel and studied fine arts and interdisciplinarity. She writes--often in collaboration--theatre and performance texts, radio plays and prose. Her texts have won numerous awards and have been performed in places like Basel, Berlin, Cairo, Istanbul, and Moscow. Overstaying is her debut novel.

Damion Searls is the author of The Inkblots a scientific and cultural history of the Rorschach test and the first biography ever of its creator, Hermann Rorschach. He has also written fiction, nonfiction, and poetry; translated thirty books from German, French, Norwegian, and Dutch, including the novels of Jon Fosse, winner of the 2023 Nobel Prize for Literature; and produced an abridged edition of Thoreau’s Journal and an experimental edition of Melville’s Moby Dick.