This year’s German-language participants are: Dorothee Elmiger(Switzerland), Andrea Grill (Austria), Julia Schoch (Germany), Antje Rávic Strubel (Germany), Peter Weber (Switzerland), and Andrea Winkler (Austria). This event is a collaboration between the Austrian Cultural Forum, Deutsches Haus at NYU, the German Book Office, the Consulate General of the Federal Republic of Germany, the Goethe-Institut New York, Pro Helvetia, and the Consulate General of Switzerland.

Susan Bernofsky, an acclaimed translator, and Paul North, an assistant professor of Germanic Language and Literature at Yale, are this year’s curators.

Schedule of Events:
2/11: Workshops, Readings, and Roundtable Discussion at Yale
1:00-7:00pm
Yale University – Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures
William L. Harkness Hall, Room 309, New Haven, CT 06520
The six authors read from and discuss their recent work. Afternoon workshops in German (1:00-5:15pm) will focus on technical aspects of each author’s style and concerns. A reading and round-table in English (5:30-7:00pm) will address the current landscape of writing in German.

2/12: The Future of the Novel
6:00-8:00pm
Powerhouse Arena, 37 Main Street, Brooklyn
Andrea Grill (”The Beautiful and the Necessary,” 2010), Peter Weber (”The
Years without Melody”, 2007), and Andrea Winkler (”Hannah and I,” 2008) are prize winning authors writing in German who, each in their own way, have determined new possibilities for the structure, form, and effects of novel writing.  Topics to be discussed include a capitalist aesthetic, prose’s new musical potentials, and the end of narrative (again) – and more.

2/13: Frühschoppen Literary Brunch
12:00pm
Deutsches Haus, 42 Washington Mews, New York University; RSVP required.
All six German-language authors of “Festival” join U.S. authors Rivka Galchen and Francine Prose for a sampling from their work, providing a taste of new writing from Austria, Germany and Switzerland.

2/13: Writing and Memory
6:00-8:00pm
Idlewild Books, 12 W. 19th Street , New York
Includes both readings and discussion, this panel with Antje Ravic Strubel, Julia Schoch, Dorothee Elmiger, Francine Prose, and Susan Bernofsky will explore the uses of literary memory.

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Wallflower is four hours in the life of Molly Lenzfeld, a sixteen-year-old New Yorker in Berlin. It’s Thanksgiving 1989, two weeks after the fall of the Wall. Molly, the daughter of a German-Jewish mother who fled the Nazis in 1938, is off to her mother’s birth house in East Berlin. On the subway trip, wallflower Molly meets East German wildflower Mick Maier, nineteen. It’s love at first sight, and for both a journey into an unknown land. $ 13.95 (paperback) – Available at www.amazon.com or at www.berlinica.com

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Cornelia Funke, born in West Germany, moved to the US in 2005 and still writes in German. The successful author of the “Inkworld” trilogy returns with a new book and a new creative partner.

Read the LA Times story:

The writer of the Inkworld trilogy returns with a fresh work, ‘Reckless,’ and a creative partner, Lionel Wigram. Tucked in the back of a lush garden exploding with flowers, Cornelia Funke’s study is a wonderland of books. Her desk is cluttered with tomes about fairy tales, which are stacked next to those about mining, alongside travel guides for Spain, France and England. A sliding ladder leads to an upper tier of titles, next to a closet that is also chock-full of hardcovers and paperbacks.

Much like Meggie and the other characters in her Inkworld trilogy, the 51-year-old author of fantasies for middle-schoolers is a self-described “book maniac,” whose writing room is ringed with the works that have helped her research — and the string of books that research has helped yield: “Dragon Rider,” “The Thief Lord” and now “Reckless,” which will be released on Tuesday. With an initial worldwide print run exceeding 1 million copies, “Reckless” is the first in a series for readers 10 and older about two brothers lured through a mirror into a world populated with dwarves and fairies and gargoyles.

And it is a first in many other ways as well. It is the first time a Funke book will be simultaneously released in 12 countries. The first time Funke will do an international webcast to be screened at live events around the globe (10:30 a.m. Tuesday PST, http://www.get-reckless.com/events.html). The first time she is touring the U.S. with a theatrical storytelling event, including a stop at the Brentwood Theater in Los Angeles on Saturday.

Read more

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Daniel Kehlmann talks about FAME on September 23 in NYC
The month of September 2010 will be “German-American Friendship Month” in the city of New York. It is the fourth consecutive time, that the city honors German-American culture and the contributions of immigrants from Germany by dedicating an entire month of celebration, in which German-Americans organize many events and festivities.
One of the event highlights of the German-American Friendship Month, is:
Reading by Daniel Kehlmann: Fame – 7 PM: Goethe-Institut Wyoming Building, 5 East 3rd Street, NYC
Bestselling author Daniel Kehlmann (”Measuring the World”), will be reading some loosely connected stories from his latest book, “Fame”.
Daniel Kehlmann leapt to literary prominence with the publication of Measuring the World (Pantheon Books, 2006), now available in 40 languages. So he knows something about the topic of his new book, Fame, which just appeared in translation by Carol Brown Janeway (Pantheon Books, 2010).
Fame is a funny and wickedly perceptive take on the twists and turns that notoriety, or the lack thereof, can play in people’s lives. The characters of Fame cross each other’s paths (and that of their author) in unexpected and, in some cases, life-altering ways.

Reading/Conversation
09/23/10
7:00pm
Goethe-Institut New York
72 Spring Street, 11th Floor
New York, NY 10012 (between Lafayette and Crosby)
In English
Free
+1 (212) 439-8700

Fame: A Novel in Nine Episodes

(Pantheon Books, Sept. 14, 2020)

In FAME (Pantheon Books / September 14, 2010), European literary superstar Daniel Kehlmann invites you to imagine being famous-recognized on the street, adored by people who have never met you, and known the world over-but then one day you get stuck in a country where celebrity means nothing, where no one speaks your language and you don’t speak theirs, where no one knows your face, and you have no way of calling home. How would your fame help you then?

Fame and facelessness, truth and deception, spin their way through all nine episodes of FAME, a captivating, wickedly funny, and perpetually surprising novel, as paths cross and plots thicken, as characters become real people and real people morph into characters. The result is a dazzling tour de force by one of Europe’s finest young writers.

About the author

Daniel Kehlmann’s Measuring the World was translated into more than forty languages. Awards his work has received include the Candide Prize, the Literature Prize of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, the Heimito von Doderer Literature Award, the Kleist Prize, the WELT Literature Prize, and the Thomas Mann Prize. Kehlmann divides his time between Vienna and Berlin.

“Brilliant . . . . Layers of connection, irony, despair, and humor distinguish this masterful work and announce Kehlmann as a worthy heir to Bowles and Camus.”

-Publishers Weekly (starred)

“[A] darkly comic tour de force . . . . A brazen take on the modern yearning for recognition. Kehlmann is a writer worth reading.” -Kirkus Reviews (starred)

“In Kehlmann’s wickedly clever novel of nine interconnected stories, fame is something his cast of widely disparate characters seek, avoid, flirt with, and succumb to-sometimes all in the same episode . . . . Kehlmann’s sundry cast members are luminous creations, and the coincidental devices that link them are brilliant gambits. Throughout, Kehlmann showcases a flair for devious satire as he ponders fact and fiction, fame and infamy.”

-Booklist (starred)

“Who would have thought contemporary Central European literature could be so fun and so funny?  Daniel Kehlmann is who. The young Austrian prodigy, famous everywhere but in the United States, has given us a real beauty of a book, farcical, satiric, melancholic, and humane. Modern fame may have been invented in America, but nobody has dramatized its paradoxes and heartbreaks more entertainingly than the European Kehlmann does here.” -Jonathan Franzen

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In this little book linguist David Crystal usefully sums
up the history of the the thing that sets the homo sapiens apart from
all other animals, language. Written with a younger and non-linguist audience
in mind it is especially joyful to read the well layouted little book
and review known things about language and learn some new things along
the way.
He beautifullly introduces the reader to the subject and splits it neatly
into 40 interesting chapters, one of them for example ethymology: That
the word salary comes from the salaire of the Roman soldierst might be
known, but that the same root is in sausage and also in the Spanish salsa
is probably a lesser known fact.
He also includes tweeting and facebooking, modern an ancient word plays,
maybe you know what anagrams are, but not what palindromes and lipograms
are?
How language came to be is universal, still the German language is referenced
a couple of times in particular, when it comes to its close connection
with English.

Author David Crystal, Honorary Professor of Linguistics at the University
of Wales, Bangor is one of the world’s peeminent language specialists.
He also writes an interesting Blog: http://david-crystal.blogspot.com

David Crystal, A little book of language, Yale University Press, 272
pages, English

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It should not be a surprise to us that the actual grease that makes the wheels turn is hard, physical work, it has been for centuries. From the middle ages and before farmers worked hard to feed their own, if they were lucky enough to own their own land, but mostly worked for the landowner who could choose without any labor laws to be more or less humane or later on in the industrial revolutions where millions started to work in factories, rather than in fields. Yet it still does, somehow we have mollycoddled up so much, that we really think that our chicken comes from the fridge the electricity directly from the outlet.

Enter a dedicated journalist who decided to start a little experiment: He will spend a year doing jobs most Americans won’t do, among the ample choices he picked: harvesting lettuce in the fields of Yuma Arizona, working in a poultry plant in Russellville, Alabama and delivering flowers and food in his hometown New York City.

The author finds out first hand what is it like to do the back-breaking work of immigrants and describes his experiences working alongside mainly Latino immigrants who thought that he was either crazy or an undercover immigration agent, in a light and entertaining way.
As one co-worker explained, “These jobs make you old quick.” – and probably even older if you grew up in the pampered US American society and not in harsher conditions in other countries, more used to physical labor. Back spasms occasionally kept Thompson in bed, where he not surprisingly suffered recurring nightmares involving iceberg lettuce and chicken carcasses.

As entertaining as his book is written, the author always remains the alien in a foreign world who always has the option to quit and above all knows that this is a temporary experiment not something he will do for the rest of his life. What stays with us, as the cushioned consumer, is that we have a choice, every single time we buy something, to consider all the elements of the chain that was necessary to bring this product to us.

Gabriel Thompson writes for New York magazine, The Nation,The Brooklyn Rail and In These Times. The author of There’s No José Here, he lives in New York City. Go to the Author’s Blog

Working in the Shadows, Nation Books (January 26th, 2010), 320 pages, English

BOOK TOUR DATES:

ARIZONA

February 19th CHANGING HANDS BOOK STORE (Tempe)

February 20th – UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA BOOKSTORE (Tucson)

February 21st – BARNES & NOBLE (Yuma)

CALIFORNIA

February 22nd – BOOK SOUP (Los Angeles)

February 24th – REVOLUTION BOOKS (Berkeley)

February 25th – CAPITOLA BOOK CAFÉ (Santa Cruz)

OREGON

March 2nd – POWELL’S BOOKS (Portland)

WASHINGTON STATE

March 3rd – ELLIOTT BAY BOOKS (Seattle)

WASHINGTON, DC

March 28th – BUSBOYS&POETS

NEW YORK

Tuesday, March 16, 7:30
Greenlight Bookstore
686 Fulton Street
Brooklyn, NY
http://abookstoreinbrooklyn.blogspot.com/
(sponsored by Pratt Area Community Council)

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The Goethe-Institut New York Library is one of the few German-language lending libraries in the United States and has the impressive number of approximately 7,000 volumes, including books (one-quarter of which are in English), audio books, DVDs, CDs, newspapers and magazines in store.

The collection features four areas of specialization:

contemporary German art;
contemporary and classic German literature;
German film; and
German history from the late 19th century to the present.

The library also publishes two blogs:

Current Writing in German is an up-to-date summary of German literary activities in the United States, new translations into English, literary award winners and other news of interest.

Librarian in Residence provides impressions, ideas and insights from the library scene in the United States and Germany.

www.goethe.de/newyork

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Schwarzenegger Biographie

New release from DVA, Random House Group and Spiegel Verlag:
“Arnold Schwarzenegger. Die Biografie” by Marc Hujer.

Everyone thinks they know Schwarzenegger: some because they once met him personally; others because the most famous Austrian in the past 30 years has become a fixture in our lives. German Spiegel reporter Marc Hujer has extensively studied Schwarzenegger for many years. The result is a book that reads more like a novel than a biography, a portrait that examines Arnold Schwarzenegger as a person and shows a close-up view of the Governator system. Insightful and thrilling Christmas reading that can be highly recommended to both fans and critics of Arnold Schwarzenegger. Currently available in German only.

Click here to read a review by Austrian journalist Barbara Gasser.

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Confections of a Closet Master Baker: One Woman’s Sweet Journey from Unhappy Hollywood Executive to Contented Country Baker
by Gesine Bullock-Prado

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