Róbert Gál

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

[E]choing Theodor Adorno's Negative Dialectics, Gál writes of a permanent gap between concept and thing. We never know the world as it is. More generally, [he] expresses an ontology of becoming, of a world of movement and change, where even "the expected comes unexpectedly".

—Jane Bennett

In our millennium, a time of reduction and minimization, the aphorism has rightly returned. Its master is Róbert Gál.

—The Forward

Great stuff. . .

—John Zorn

Selected Works

LITERATURE, APHORISM, POETRY

Naked Thoughts

"Here is something really new. Róbert Gál's archipelago of fragmentary narratives, ruminations and aphorisms gives us a new kind of reading experience—one marked by disjunction and divergence rather than by linear narrative or structured argument. I’d like to think of Naked Thoughts as a harbinger of a writing to come, unconfined by any of the familiar categories we use to classify our books."

—Lars Iyer

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 Fiction

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."

—American Book Review