Seven Nights: Reading and Discussion with Simon Strauß and Cressida Leyshon

In collaboration with Frankfurt Book Fair New York

11/13/19
7:00pm
Goethe-Institut New York

Simon Strauß will speak about his debut novel Seven Nights (Translated by Eva Bacon & Lee Bacon; Rare Bird Books, October 2019)  with deputy fiction editor for The New Yorker, Cressida Leyshon.

Strauß has written a novel describing the struggle of a generation afraid of standing still and moving too fast, afraid of missing out and making decisions. In his novel, for seven times at seven o’clock, a young man will encounter one of the seven mortal sins. He must be greedy, arrogant and lustful, throw himself off a high-rise building, and lose his faith and every restraint. These nights are a foray through the city, a test of maturity to safeguard against too much maturity, a final rebellion as youth slips away. While he tries to find a way out of what he fears to be a boring and meaningless adulthood, the book itself is a fearless appeal to break free from the opinions of others and follow your own heart.

The most reviewed, discussed, and acclaimed German-language debut of the last decade, Seven Nights has earned Simon Strauß praise as “one of the greatest talents of his generation” by the Tagesspiegel newspaper, and also one of the most controversial.
 

Simon Strauss, son of the German writer Botho Strauss, was born in Berlin in 1988. He has worked as a freelance journalist for the Basler Zeitung, the Süddeutsche Zeitung and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ). Since 2016, he has been a writer for the culture section of the FAZ.

Cressida Leyshon is the deputy fiction editor at The New Yorker.