Rainer J. Hanshe was born in Tehran, Iran, and raised in New York. He is a co-founder of the Nietzsche Circle, and the founder of Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics.

Hanshe is the author of "The Acolytes," which world-renowned Kafka scholar Walter H. Sokel called "a powerful novel that reverberates in the inner spaces of the self," and "The Abdication," which Stuart Kendall deemed "a visionary novel of dangerous ideas, ... [a book] both experimental and assured, a comedy of high seriousness and gospel of the flesh that our winded civilization has needed for 2,000 years." Other texts by Hanshe include the introduction to Gian DiDonna's play on Descartes, "Renati the King," and the introduction to Yunus Tuncel's "Towards a Genealogy of Spectacle." He also translated the introduction to Miklos Szentkuthy's "Marginalia on Casanova."

Current projects include "Alien & Illogical Powers," a philosophical text on synaesthesia, incubation, poetics, and other esoteric dimensions of Nietzsche's thought, as well as a new novel, tentatively titled *Asbestos Gelos.*