"A fast, complex, exhilarating roadster ride through history and time.... Kino is an intoxicating Euro-brew, written with enormous skill and dedication." — Frederick Barthelme

"Jürgen Fauth's deft mashup of genre and historical period is both a full-throttle literary thriller of ideas and a contemplative examination of film and fascism. Kino is a debut of great intellectual force."– Teddy Wayne

"A surprising alternative history. Kino brings the golden age of German cinema to light with loving, sometimes gritty, detail and great precision." – Neal Pollack, author of Jewball.

"A delirious melange of conspiracy, magic, sex, history, bad behavior, and cinema, Kino is a stellar entertainment, and Jürgen Fauth is a writer of rare, sinister imagination." – Owen King, author of Reenactment

"A light-hearted romp that leads straight into darkness and back through the shadows on the wall."– Ben Loory, author of Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day

"Movie nuts arise! A happy and felicitous debut."– Terese Svoboda
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Cleopatra

For some reason I was under the impression that Cecil B. DeMille’s Cleopatra was silent, but of course it’s not. How else could Claudette Colbert trade cheesy come-ons with noble Romans? Production design is sumptuous, and since this film is much shorter than Mankiewicz’s 1963 version with Liz Taylor (or Rome, for that matter), the plot zips by: the Queen of Egypt has just barely finished rolling out of the rug when a bearded Brutus decides to rid the republic of J.C., here comes the Queen’s barge, Actium, the asps! Colbert is more flapper than ancient monarch, and that’s fine by me–she may well be my favorite Cleopatra yet. Whenever she’s off-screen, the movie drags, but her seductions of Julius Caesar and Marc Antony are great camp.

Cleopatra. Cecil B. DeMille, 1934. ****