Adam Ehrlich Sachs

Adam Ehrlich Sachs is the author of three works of fiction—Gretel and the Great War (2024), The Organs of Sense (2019), and Inherited Disorders: Stories, Parables, and Problems (2016). A master of ambiguity, Sachs imbues his oeuvre with a multiplicity of meaning. Describing Gretel and the Great War for the Chicago Review of Books, Joe Stanek says the book is “cultural criticism embedded in a folkloric tale disguised as a bedtime story presented as a mystery.” When it comes to Sachs, everything is both-and. Even the historical setting of his two latest works—the Austro-Hungarian empire—is a mirror for today. As the author puts it, “it’s all somewhat stupider this time around, the art is worse, the bombs are bigger, the internet exists, but everything else feels about the same.” Sachs’s prose, steeped in humor, provides readers with an entry point to explore the author’s obsessions, namely solipsism and whether we can know anything outside our own minds, including, most heartbreakingly, those closest to us. Standing on a peak all his own in the field of contemporary literature, Sachs is often compared to Kafka for his masterful sense for the absurd (one of his characters is a blind astronomer) and Thomas Bernhard (think maddeningly exhilarating recursive sentences). The recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Literature (2018) and an American Academy in Berlin Fellowship (2019), Sachs lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania with his family.