Introduction -- Voices of the vacuum: monologue in Schopenhauer, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche -- Unworldly anarchism: Gustav Landauer's nihilist community -- Society of nobodies: Franz Kafka and the communal vacuum -- Monologue overgrown: the language of hypertrophy in Thomas Bernhard's Leichtlebig -- Nobody's friends: outsider community in Wolfgang Hilbig's prose -- Conclusion