Thomas Stangl has demonstrated with his volume "Traveling and Ghosts" that his extraordinary, profound prose not only produces great works in the realm of narrative literature but that the same artistry also permeates his essays. Literature always benefits from this – and at certain times, it is even essential – when it is not only engaged with through writing and reading but also contemplated in fundamental and sometimes unfamiliar contexts, and in this, Thomas Stangl is a master. These are texts about the space of literature, about the mystery of standing for nothing, the solitude that withdraws from the social ("and thus from violence, including the violence of the narrated"), about the indeterminate in which and from which literature lives, and about "the tension between words like 'strange' and 'real'," about revolutionary hopes.