(Berlin, Miami): A Novel

A hallucinatory near-future dystopia, cowritten with an AI, about language on the verge of collapse.

“I was dead but also wasn’t. And with that, I had also understood what happened to my father.”

(Berlin, Miami) is an experimental novel written in collaboration with a language model, fed four German novels, and translated from the German by Noah Harley. In it, Hannes Bajohr presents, in Dadaistic fashion, a near-future Miami and Berlin populated by characters caught up in a world reshaped by an undefined catastrophe called THE DIFFERENCE. Real or hallucinatory objects and creatures—the jawling, Vapor Pools, co-yoga—appear and reappear. The prose, absurd and often hilarious, moves between social realism, bureaucratic report, and dream logic, deteriorating by the end into garbled tokens and multilingual fragments, closing on the literal string <|endoftext|>.

The novel continues the long tradition of experimental writing that has used formal disruption to challenge the limits of narrative: Burroughs’ cut-up, the Language poets, Ballard, Acker, and the generative fictions of electronic literature. But (Berlin, Miami) is and isn’t a book about AI; it’s a book made from what AI does to language. For experimental literature readers—fans of Dalkey Archive and Fitzcarraldo Editions—the novel is a rigorous formal achievement in a tradition they already value. For the broader cultural conversation about AI and authorship, it offers one of the first major examples of collaboration with a language model as a principle of literary form.