What can an irascible East German tell us about how society shapes relations between the sexes? A lot it turns out. Acclaimed as one of Wolfgang Hilbig’s major works, finds the lauded author focusing his labyrinthine, mercurial mind on how unequal societies can pervert sexuality and destroy a healthy, productive understanding of gender. It begins with a factory laborer who ogles women in secret on the job. When those same women mysteriously vanish from their small town, the worker sets out on a hallucinatory journey to find them. Powerful and at times disturbing, leaves us with some of the most challenging, radical, and enduring insights of any novel from the GDR.