This landmark collection of essays by one of the world’s greatest living authors makes Durs Grünbein’s wide-ranging and multifaceted prose available in English for the first time, and is a welcome complement to Ashes for Breakfast (FSG, 2005), his first book-length collection of poetry in English. Covering two decades, The Bars of Atlantis unfurls the entire breadth and depth of Grünbein’s essayistic genius: memoiristic and autobiographical pieces that introduce Grünbein, the man and author, and tell the story of the making of a poet and thinker toward the end of a century marked by global political strife, unprecedented human suffering, long decades of totalitarian rule, and, in its final quarter, the dawn of a new, post–cold war world order; pieces that focus on Grünbein’s major philosophical and aesthetic concerns, such as the intersection of art and science, literature and biology; extended reflections on the existential, cultural, political, and ethical import of the poet’s craft in the contemporary world; and, finally, explorations of the meaning of classical antiquity for the present. All contribute to making this volume a true classic of critical prose.