Rainer J. Hanshe is a writer and the founder of Contra Mundum Press and the journal Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics. He is the author of two novels, The Acolytes (2010) and The Abdication (2012), and the editor of Richard Foreman's Plays with Films (2013) and Wordsworth's Fragments (2014). He is also the author of the hybrid entity Shattering the Muses (2016), Closing Melodies (2023), a phantomatic encounter between Nietzsche & Van Gogh, Dionysos Speed (2024), and Humanimality (2025). Work of his has appeared in Caesura, Sinn und Form, ChrisMarker.org, Asymptote, Black Sun Lit's Vestiges, and elsewhere. In 2016, Petite Plaisance published an Italian translation of his second novel, The Abdication. Shorter and longer works of his have been translated into other languages, and in 2021, the journal Po&sie staged an event at Maison de la poésie in Paris to honor his work.

His own translations include Baudelaire's My Heart Laid Bare (2017; 2020), Belgium Stripped Bare (2019), and Paris Spleen (2021), Évelyne Grossman's The Creativity of the Crisis (2023), Antonin Artaud's Journey to Mexico: Revolutionary Messages (2024), and Léon-Paul Fargue's High Solitude (2024), as well as longer and shorter works by other authors. His translation of Léon-Paul Fargue's The Stroller of Paris is forthcoming from Eris Press in 2024. Beyond Sense, a vatic exploration of the aphasiac disintegration of Hölderlin, Baudelaire, Nietzsche, and Artaud, is due out in 2026, The Accumulating Wreckage: Poems, Essays, & Other Texts in 2027, and Paris Without End: Assorted Translations From Giacometti to Artaud: 1914-1964 in 2028. He is at work on a new book entitled Axis Fasci: Burn Poet Burn. Author site: literaryabsolute.com.