Goethe-Institut New York | Current Writing Blog

Workshop
02/10/12
1:00-4:30pm
Deutsches Haus at Columbia University
420 W. 116th Street at Amsterdam Avenue
New York, NY 10027
Tel: +1 (212) 854-3202
In German and English
Free and open to the public

The 2012 Festival Neue Literatur starts off at full-tilt this Friday, with "How German Is It?", two workshops featuring the six German, Austrian and Swiss authors of the Festival in conversation with Columbia students. Professor of German Mark Anderson will give the introductory remarks at 1pm, followed by a discussion of the family novel, pairing Columbia students with authors Larissa Boehning, Catalin Dorian Florescu and Monica Cantieni . After a short coffee break, the second workshop, from 3:00 to 4:30pm, covers Vergangenheitsversuche, or "Trying Out the Past", with authors Inka Parei, Erwin Uhrmann and Linda Stift speaking with students.

Deutsches Haus at Columbia University is located just east of Amsterdam Avenue. By subway take the 1/B/C trains to 116th Street.

Readings/Discussions
02/10/12-02/12/12
Various NY venues
In English and German
Free and open to the public

The third annual Festival Neue Literatur begins this Friday and continues through Sunday at venues in Manhattan and Brooklyn, including Deutsches Haus at Columbia University, powerHouse Arena, Deutsches Haus NYU and McNally Jackson Books. This year's author's, representing some of the best new talent in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, are Inka Parei and Larissa Boehning from Germany, Monica Cantieni and Catalin Dorian Florescu from Switzerland and Austrians Linda Stift and Erwin Uhrmann. They will be joined by US authors Chris Adrian and Francisco Goldman at powerHouse Arena and McNally Jackson, respectively

The festival website provides a complete schedule of events, bios of the authors and samples of their work in English. All events are free and open to the public, but an RSVP is required for the Deutsches Haus NYU event on Sunday, February 12.

Awarded every other year, the Calwer Hermann-Hesse-Preis for 2012 goes to Susan Bernofsky. The jury praised not only her translation of Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha, but also her other prose translations from German, calling her work sensitive, with a sure sense of style.

The Calwer Hermann-Hesse-Preis alternates biannually between a literary journal and a translator of the Nobel Prize-winning Swiss author. This year's cermemony, to be held in Calw on July 2, Hesse's birthday, comes with a 15,000 Euro purse.

Susan Bernofsky is the curator of this year's Festival Neue Literatur, a three-day series of discussions and readings held throughout Manhattan and Brooklyn. She will be moderating the panel discussion at powerHouse Arena this Saturday night.

Novelist, essayist and children's and short story writer Felicitas Hoppe's work includes Johanna, Pigafetta and Picknick der Friseure, in addition to translations, such as that of the poetry of Dr. Seuss. She has received a number of literary prizes, the latest being the Rattenfänger-Literaturpreis from her native Hameln, for her children's novel Iwein Löwenritter. In March, she will publish her ninth book, a "dream autobiography" titled -- Hoppe.

As a spring Fellow at Villa Aurora in Los Angeles, Felicitas Hoppe will be working on a project entitled Ilf and Petrov Revisited, based on the road trip journey made by Russian satirists Ilya Ilf and Jevgeni Petrov through Depression-era America and Mexico.

Book Signing
01/31/12
5:30 – 7:30pm
Rizzoli Bookstore
31 West 57th St.
New York, NY 10019
tel.: +1 (212) 759-2424
Free

Jan-Philipp Sendker's debut novel, Das Herzhören, hit it big in Germany when it was published in 2004. The translation by Kevin Wiliarty, The Art of Hearing Heartbeats (Other Press), makes its debut at this launch and book signing at Rizzoli.

Set in Burma, this love story spans the half-century from the 1950s to the present. After a successful New York lawyer disappears without a trace, his wife and daughter find a love letter he wrote many years before to a Burmese woman they have never heard of. When the man's daughter, Julia, travels to the woman's village, she uncovers a tale of unimaginable hardship and passion.

Jan-Philipp Sendker has served as both American and Asian correspondent for Stern magazine. In 2000 he published Cracks in the Great Wall, a nonfiction book about China. He lives in Berlin with his family.

Staged Reading
01/30/12
7:00pm
Goethe-Institut New York
72 Spring Street (btw. Crosby & Lafayette)
New York, NY 10012
In English
Free admission
Tel.: +1 (212) 439-8700

Dea Loher, one of Germany’s most produced and celebrated contemporary playwrights, is not well-known here in the States -- though her nearly 20 plays have received virtually every major German theater award and been translated into 28 languages -- but that may be about to change.

Director Daniel Brunet, who in 2010 was awarded a Pen Translation Fund grant for his translation of Loher’s play, The Last Fire, has now translated Innocence, which he also directs at this professional staged reading, the first to be given before a US audience. The cast, including Diane Ciesla, Korey Jackson, Royce Johnson, Johanna McKeon, Julia Moss, Katie Mullins, Mary Kate Schellhardt, and Jesse Paul Wilson, take on the roles of an assorted group of characters living marginal lives in an unidentified city in Europe. Among them are two illegal African immigrants, a young, blind dancer, and an undertaker’s assistant and his diabetic mother-in-law.