Rainer J. Hanshe

Rainer J. Hanshe was born in Tehran, Iran, raised in New York, and has resided in Europe and elsewhere.

Hanshe is the author of The Acolytes, which world-renowned Kafka scholar Walter H. Sokel called "a powerful novel that reverberates in the inner spaces of the self," and The Abdication, which Stuart Kendall deemed "a visionary novel of dangerous ideas, ... [a book] both experimental and assured, a comedy of high seriousness and gospel of the flesh that our winded civilization has needed for 2,000 years." He is also the author of the hybrid entity Shattering the Muses (2016), a collaboration with visual artist Federico Gori, Closing Melodies (2023), a phantomatic encounter between Nietzsche & Van Gogh, and Dionysos Speed (2024).

His newest work, Humanimality, is forthcoming in 2025. Beyond Sense, a vatic exploration of the aphasiac disintegration of Hölderlin, Baudelaire, Nietzsche, and Artaud, is due out in 2026. He is at work on a new book entitled Burn Poet Burn.