Reading from the author’s acclaimed post-unification novel
Join author Jenny Erpenbeck for a reading and discussion of her novel
Kairos.
The celebrated German writer Jenny Erpenbeck, one of the most compelling voices in contemporary literature, joins Declan Spring, Vice President and Senior Editor at New Directions, for the only New York appearance on her US book tour. Her novel
Kairos, translated by Michael Hofmann, narrates a sweeping romance which began in the waning years of the GDR and encircles past and present, as well as the interlocking strains of both individual and collective memory. The
Times Literary Supplement writes that
Kairos ‘’masterfully captures the existential bewilderment of this period between states and ideologies.’’
Jenny Erpenbeck was born in East Berlin in 1967. Published in translation in the US by New Directions, Erpenbeck is the author of
The Old Child & Other Stories,
The End of Days,
The Book of Words, and
Visitation, which NPR called “a story of the century as seen by the objects we’ve known and lost along the way.”
The End of Days won the prestigious Hans Fallada Prize and the International Foreign Fiction Prize and is the author’s representative text for the 2024 Neustadt International Prize for Literature. Her most well-known work,
Go, Went, Gone, was longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2018, of which
New Yorker critic James Wood noted that the book would be cited “[when] Erpenbeck wins the Nobel Prize.” Following her insightful non-fiction essay collection
Not a Novel, comes the novel
Kairos, longlisted for the 2023 National Book Award for Translated Literature.
Declan Spring is Vice President and Senior Editor at New Directions. He has worked there since 1991 and has edited works by Anne Carson, Inger Christensen, Jenny Erpenbeck, Forrest Gander, Bohumil Hrabal, Laszlo Krasznahorkai, Fernando Pessoa, Fernando Vallejo, and Enrique Vila-Matas, among others.
Books will be available for purchase and signing, and attendees will be able to participate in a Q&A following the reading.
This event is presented in cooperation with New Directions Publishing.
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