Róbert Gál

RÓBERT GÁL is a Slovak-born writer and editor living in Prague. He is the author of several books of aphorisms, fiction, and philosophical fragments available in English translation, including Tractatus (Schism Press, 2022), Naked Thoughts (Black Sun Lit, 2019), Agnomia (Dalkey Archive Press, 2018), On Wing (Dalkey Archive Press, 2015), and Signs & Symptoms (Twisted Spoon Press, 2003).

For Gál the art, and act itself, of writing is an exercise in dismantling the world about us, a world which operates as a distraction from our fundamental actuality: spiritual flux, the entropy of the soul.

—3:AM Magazine

[Gál's aphorisms] unfold and refold like intricate origami birds.

—Douglas Glover

Always traversing the cutting edge, Róbert Gál is one of the most fascinating, provocative, and inspiring poets writing today.

—John Zorn

Selected Works

philosophy, poetry, prose

Tractatus

"A delirious Wittgenstein, a disgruntled Gracián. With the Tractatus Róbert Gál gives us an axiomatic philosophy perplexed by its own doubts and uncertainties."
—Eugene Thacker

LITERATURE, APHORISM, POETRY

Naked Thoughts

"Whether he's inverting the closing line of Wittgenstein's Tractatus, upending some cliché, or crafting stark truisms that exude a hard-won simplicity, Róbert Gál's amusing and pessimistic micro-philosophies are always a rare joy."

—Gary J. Shipley

Memoir, Fiction, Philosophy

Agnomia

"The starting point and the point of return intersect, perhaps on a single level higher, perhaps on two. Hegelian dialectic couples with myth on eternal return. We exit from agnomia and into her we return, illuminated by the journey, by the experience of words."

—Ladislav Šerý

experimental prose

On Wing

"Róbert Gál is a phenomenon unto himself: a purveyor of neurotic philosophy encapsulated in elliptical portents and epifragmentals, the content of which is at all odds with their length."

—Joshua Cohen

Aphorism, Philosophy, Poetry

Signs & Symptoms

"For Gál, the paradox is the order at the heart of things; it is both the structure of the universe and the 'logic' of the human mind."

—Jane Bennett