Heidegger's Glasses

by Frank, Thaisa

• ISBN13: 9781597773317
• ISBN10: 159777331X
• Edition: Unabridged
• Format: CD
• Copyright: 2010-05-25
• Publisher: Phoenix Books Inc

Summary

Heidegger’s Glasses opens during the end of World War II in a failing Germany, when the third Reich is in shambles. Hitler’s strong belief in and reliance on the occult led to the formation of an underground society of scribes responsible for answering letters written to the imprisoned and deceased. A letter arrives at the compound that eminent philosopher Martin Heidegger wrote to his optometrist, kindling a series of events that puts everyone’s safety, and lives, in danger. They embark on a desperate journey, racing to Heidegger’s secluded hut in Black Forest and the death-saturated camps of Auschwitz.  

Ultimately, the novel explores the way the dead are remembered and history is presented, with Heidegger’s philosophy weaved throughout in an easily digestible, albeit multifaceted, manner. Thaisa Frank evocatively illustrates the Holocaust through a dreamlike, Alice in Wonderland frame, reconstructing the landscape of Nazi Germany from an entirely original vantage point.

Author Biography

Thaisa Frank’s short stories have received two PEN awards, and her two most recent collections Sleeping in Velvet, 1998, and A Brief History of Camouflage, 1992) have been on the Bestseller List of the San Francisco Chronicle and were nominated for the Bay Area Book Reviewer’s Association Award. A Brief History of Camouflage was included in Dalton’s New Voices. Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies, including HarperCollins Reader’s Choice.

Frank has also written Finding Your Writer’s Voice, co-authored with Dorothy Wall. It has been compared to Brenda Uleland's book If You Want to Write and has been translated into Portuguese and Spanish. She has taught writing in the graduate department of San Francisco State, is on the part-time faculty at the University of San Francisco and has been Visiting Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of California at Berkeley. Recently, Frank penned an afterword for Voltaire’s Candide, Zadig and Selected Stories.