Glage has given us an utterly captivating collage of essays that is, in the truest and best sense, sui generis. With its unerring instinct for unearthing intellectual gold in the inexhaustible, labyrinthine, and stubbornly persistent realm of printed matter, The Devil's Library stands in the lineage of Thomas Browne, Coleridge, Borges, and Sebald. Ranging from the abstruse to the fantastic, the complex paradoxes and insights here reclaimed from philosophical, theological, anthropological, or biographical miscellany and brought to life so vividly in these pages are not just being rescued from oblivion. Rather, in Glage's tonally varied and subtly propulsive telling, they are in a deeper sense redeemed. Few books better stage the absorbing delights of voracious, disinterested, and eclectic reading everything from treatises to telegrams, from Scriptural exegesis to newspaper clippings. Glage's responsiveness to the unexpected enriches us all.
-Thomas Pfau, Alice Mary Baldwin Professor of English & Professor of Systematic Theology, Duke University
Browse the stacks of The Devil's Library at your peril! You'll find obscure but fascinating treatises demonstrating that God cannot be perfect, labyrinthine heretical arguments against traditional morals, and reports of the mysterious deaths and murders of authors. A demonic alternative version of Genesis turns sacred history upside down. Who knew that the devil was not only a humorist but the author of frightening underground books? Discover them here.
-Gary Shapiro, author, Nietzsche's Earth: Great Events, Great Politics
Hoax meets homage in this glorious collection, an imaginary where bespoke apocrypha and wishful thinking invite us into a labyrinth of possibility, association, and a kind of readerly revisionist collaboration. Funny, subversive, and authoritatively anti-authoritarian, Glage finds no tradition unassailable or otherwise invulnerable to his joyful repurposing. What Stanley Crawford did for travel writing in Travel Notes, Glage does for storytelling and bibliophilia. Joachim Glage is not only a writers' writer but writing's writer. Borges is dancing in his grave.
-Andrew Tonkovich, editor, Santa Monica Review
Joachim Glage's fiendishly entertaining collection combines the pleasures of deciphering an ancient scroll, curling up with a good detective story, and stealing an accursed manuscript from a crypt. Erudite, inventive, and marvelously sly, The Devil's Library will delight readers of philosophical speculative fiction until it dissolves in a plume of evil-smelling smoke."
-Sofia Samatar, author, The White Mosque and A Stranger in Olondria
