Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors

Melodrama, biography, cold war thriller, drug memoir, essay in fragments, mystery - Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors is cult critic Ian Penman's long awaited first original book, a kaleidoscopic study of the late West German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1945-1982). Written quickly under a self-imposed deadline in the spirit of Fassbinder himself, who would often get films made in a matter of weeks or months, Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors presents the filmmaker as a pivotal figure in the late 1970s moment between late modernism and the advent of postmodernism and the digital revolution. Compelling, beautifully written and genuinely moving, echoing the fragmentary and reflective works of writers like Barthes and Cioran, this is a story that has everything: sex, drugs, art, the city, cinema and revolution.

Ian Penman is a British writer, music journalist, and critic. He began his career at the NME in 1977, later contributing to various publications including The Face, Arena,Tatler, Uncut, Sight & Sound, The Wire, the Guardian, the London Review of Books and City Journal. He is the author of the collections Vital Signs: Music, Movies, and Other Manias (Serpent's Tail, 1998) and It Gets Me Home, This Curving Track (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2019). His first original book, Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2023), won the RSL Ondaatje Prize for Literature and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography in 2024.