Nietzsche's Kisses
“Nietzsche’s Kisses is a brilliant achievement, a seamless, precise, marvelously affecting novel that must be read by everyone who appreciates the best of today’s fiction.”
— American Book Review
“Olsen … depicts this fallen übermensch with inventiveness and stark-raving prose.”
— Time Out New York
“Nietzsche’s Kisses is a brilliant book and a book of brilliances, one which follows the logic of the disintegration of a great mind with poetic grace, profound comedy, and a sense of tragic inevitability. With this novel Lance Olsen moves well beyond mere experimentalism to occupy a ground worthy of the magisterial and manic figure of Nietzsche himself. This is a deeply moving, compelling, intelligent, and utterly human account of the power of mind and the glory of post-history’s first and most vulnerable superman.”
— Michael Joyce
“This is a complex work—invigorating and exhauting at the same time. I was dazzled by it.”
— The Olympian
“Lance Olsen’s Nietzsche’s Kisses has a Dionysian soul that the great philosopher would have loved. More importantly, Olsen, and the novel, understand what Nietzsche meant about the scary business of looking into the abyss.”
— Percival Everett
“A fine and daring writer.”
— Publishers Weekly
“A riveting, witty, and empathetic exploration of a fascinating mind, and beautifully written.”
— Kelly Cherry
“This Philip K. Dick Award nominee continues Olsen’s, and Dick’s, tradition of exploring human consciousness, sometimes in delightful and surprising ways.”
— Library Journal
“Kisses, tears, and laughter. Pride, embarrassment, and humiliation. Lance Olsen’s beautiful novel gives us both the “human, all too human” side of Nietzsche, and the dream of lightness and grace that was central to his philosophy, but that is too often forgotten or ignored by his disciples.”
— Steven Shaviro