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, Dionysos Speed (2024), and Humanimality (2025).

Some of his translations include Baudelaire’s My Heart Laid Bare (2017; 2020), Belgium Stripped Bare (2019), and Paris Spleen (2021), Évelyne Grossman’s The Creativity of the Crisis (2023), Antonin Artaud’s Journey to Mexico: Revolutionary Messages (2024), and Léon-Paul Fargue’s High Solitude (2024) and The Stroller of Paris (2026).

Lithogenesis: A Choral Poetics of Accretion, Rupture, and Becoming (a collaboration in part with Dejan Lukić) is forthcoming in late 2026, as is Beyond Sense, a vatic exploration of the aphasiac disintegration of Hölderlin, Baudelaire, Nietzsche, and Artaud. He is at work on several other books: Burn Poet Burn, The Radio of Thought, The Edge of Language, and The Metabolic Unmaking of the Self.