The book resembles a stream of anxiety fuelled by fears of loss and financial worries, both individual and social. Written as an interior monologue, it brings into play emotions and moods that everyone in today’s crisis-ridden world is familiar with. The anxieties lurking around every corner are addressed here with profound psychoanalytical insight. Angst und Geld (Fear and Money) does not seek to get us over our worries and anxieties—instead they are treated as a welcome opportunity and catalyst for literary writing. Author and art historian Isabelle Graw teaches at the Städelschule in Frankfurt and is one of the founding editors of Texte zur Kunst.

„Es gelingt Isabelle Graws Romanessay auf glänzende Weise, zwei gleichermaßen schwer greifbare Bedrängnisse wie ansteigende Ängste und fehlendes Geld in einen langen Monolog über konkrete Alltagsverwirrungen zu übersetzen. Die elegante, metropolitane und intellektuell versierte Ich- Erzählerin begegnet ihnen verzweifelt oder selbstironisch, panisch oder mit gespielter Leichtigkeit. Es dürfte heutigen Städtebewohnern leicht fallen, sich in diesen subtilen Selbstbeobachtungen, in diesen verstörenden, zuweilen komischen Episoden und Reflexionen wiederzuerkennen. Ein Buch voller Melancholie und Klarsicht.“ Joseph Vogl

„Isabelle Graw’s novel-cum-essay succeeds, in brilliant fashion, in transposing two equally elusive sources of distress—mount- ing anxiety and the lack of money—into a long monologue about concrete everyday perplexities. The elegant, metropoli- tan, and intellectually accomplished first-person narrator faces up to these challenges with a sense of despair or self- irony, with panic or feigned levity. For today’s urbanites it should be easy enough to recognize themselves in these subtle self-observations, in these unsettling, sometimes com- ical episodes and reflections. It is a book full of melancholy and lucidity.” Joseph Vogl