NEW LITERATURE FROM EUROPE FESTIVAL | READING: ARTISTIC FICTIONS
06:00 – 8:00 PM
VENUE: Printed Matter
“Disaster”
1/ Klemens Renoldner (Austria)
2/ Luc Lang (France)
3/ Marc Degens (Germany)
4/ Marek Bartelik (Poland/USA)
Introduction: Edna McCown
07:00 – 09:00 PM
VENUE: 192 Books
“Fantasy”
1/ Monika Zgustova (Czech Republic)
2/ Agnieszka Taborska (Poland)
3/ Dumitru Tzpeneag (Romania)
4/ Ricardo Menendez Salmon (Spain)
Introduction: David Goldfarb
This year’s New Literature From Europe festival kicks off with a reading by all participants: authors Klemens Renoldner (AUT), Monika Zgustova (CZ), Luc Lang (FR), Marc Degens (GER), Agnieszka Taborska (PL), Dumitru Tsepeneag (ROM), and Ricardo Menéndez Salmón (SP) will read from their books.
Literature has been inspired by visual art and music since the Hebrew bible and the epics of Homer, and the lives of artists have been the subject of the novel at least since the Nineteenth Century. The ninth annual New Literature from Europe festival asks why European writers are writing about art, about artists, and about the art world today. What does this art about other arts reveal about the creative process? Who is the audience for fiction about art? Why does it seem that painting or music is often used in the novel as a link between present and past, or even as a means for conjuring the dead? What can be revealed when one art form is refracted through another art form? Are we seeing a resurgence of Surrealism in the wake of 9/11, in which the world now seems Surreal or virtualized? Has our reality become fragmented? Is there a clear line between fiction and critical thought? In the work of the authors participating in this year’s festival the conclusions are both serious and satirical and range from a feminist exploration of the lives of women artists across time, to the story of a man who can’t stop painting his deceased daughter, an illustrated work about a New England spirit medium at the dawn of photography, the tale of a modern musician who channels Chopin, a surrealistic novel about a novel called The Bulgarian Truck, a mystery surrounding an exhibition of African art in Liverpool, and a skewering of the art market that asks whether the art world just takes itself too seriously.
ABOUT THE PARTICIPANTS
Moderator Marek Bartelik studied art at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, holds a Master of Science degree in Civil Engineering from Columbia University and a PhD in Art History from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He has been teaching art at the Cooper Union since 1996. His articles appeared in, among other magazines and newspapers, CAA Art Journal, Art in America, and Artforum—for which he has written exhibition reviews from more than 20 countries on four continents. His books include numerous books on art. His debut volume of poetry, East Sixth Street: 50 poems, was published in 2006.
Born in 1953, Klemens Renoldner (Austria) studied literature and music; worked as dramaturg in a number of renowned theaters of German language (Vienna, Munich, Zurich, and others) and later, as a curator of literature in the Austrian Cultural Forum in Berlin. Since 2008 he is the Director of the Stefan Zweig Center at the Salzburg University. He has an extensive bibliography; his novel “Lily’s Impatience” came out at the end of 2011.The book has been received very well by reviewers.
Monika Zgustova (Czech Republic) is an award winning author whose works have been translated into nine languages. She was born in Prague. In the 1970s she studied comparative literature in the United States. In the 1980s she moved to Barcelona, where she writes for the opinion-editorial articles in “El Pais”, Spain’s leading newspaper, as well as for Mlada Fronta Dnes, the Czech leading newspaper. As a translator of Czech and Russian literature into Spanish and Catalan –including the writing of Havel, Kundera, Hrabal, Dostoevsky, Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, and Babel– Zgustova is credited with bringing major twentieth-century writers into Spain.
Luc Lang (France) is the prize-winning author of, among others: Voyage sur la ligne d’horizon, Cruel 13, La Fin des paysages, and Mille six cents ventres (published in English translation as Strange Ways). He has in addition to novels and short stories, written essays on visual arts; and has contributed to various art exhibition catalogs, collections, or research paper. Lang has also published the startling autobiographical work, 11 septembre mon amour (Stock, 2003). His Cruel 13 will be published in English by The University of Nebraska Press in 2014. Lang writes widely on contemporary art and on the art of the novel and teaches aesthetics at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts de Paris et Cergy.
Marc Degens (Germany), publisher, musician, and author, was born in 1971 and lives in Bonn. He is publisher and literary editor of the online feuilleton, satt.org, which features essays on and reviews of German-language literature of the 20th and 21st Centuries, comics, and pop culture. He is also editorial director of the SuKuLTuR publishing house. After living in Armenia for three years, where he curated the 2009 exhibit, “New German Newspaper Comics”, Degens was writer-in-residence in Novi Sad, Serbia, before returning to Germany to co-conceive and moderate “The Enthusiasm Show”, a “feuilleton for the stage.” Degen’s collection of columns first published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, titled Unsere Popmoderne (2005), presents excerpts from 28 fictional works of contemporary literature with commentary on their fictional authors. His latest works are a new edition of Unsere Popmoderne (2010) and the novel, Das kaputte Knie Gottes (2011).
Agnieszka Taborska (Poland), born 1961, is reimagining the surreal for the postmodern era. A lecturer at the Rhode Island School of Design since 1989, her main areas of interest are the image of women in fin de siècle Western art and literature, French Surrealism, the significance of women in the movement and the impact Surrealism has on contemporary art. She is the author of 11 books published in Poland, US, France, Germany, Japan and Korea. Her works of fiction have received literary prizes in Germany and have been adapted for stage and brought to screen in form of award-winning animated films at International Film Festivals. Excerpts from, The Unfinished Life of Phoebe Hicks, have been published in The Saint Ann’s Review (Fall 2009, Fall 2010). Her books include Conspirators of Imagination. Surrealism (collection of essays published in Poland), The Whale, or Objective Chance (collection of short stories published in Poland), and The Dreaming Life of Leonora de la Cruz (published in Poland, France and the US).
Dumitru Tsepeneag (Romania), born 1937, was a leading member and theorist of the Romanian ‘oneiricist’ group in the late 1960s and early 70s, before the communist regime suppressed the literary movement. The regime viewed Tsepeneag as a troublemaker and in 1975 Ceausescu himself personally signed the decree stripping him of his Romanian citizenship, thus forcing him into exile. He settled in Paris, continuing to write literary work in Romanian, and later in French, as well as publishing extensively in the press. He has a vast bibliography of short prose, novels, and collections of articles.
Ricardo Menéndez Salmón (Spain) is one of the most respected writers in the Spanish literary scene. Born in Gijón (Asturias) in 1971, he studied Philosophy and has written eight novels, a book of short stories and a literary travel book. He regularly publishes articles in newspapers, and cultural and literary journals. His work has been translated into Catalan, French, Italian, Dutch and Portuguese, and he has received numerous literary awards. Praised unanimously by critics in Spain, his prose, rich and cultivated, has been described as having “a personal style, strong and close to expressionism” (El País); “a mature writer with the air of a classic” (ABC Cultural), “no writer today can compare to Ricardo Menéndez Salmón” (Qué Leer); “Goyesque imagery” (Revista de Letras), “the best of a generation of writers” (La Razón). His upcoming novel, “Medusa”, will come out in September.
ABOUT THE FESTIVAL
This annual festival that presents and celebrates new literary offerings from European authors is organized by the New York branches of the Austrian Cultural Forum, Czech Center, Cultural Services of the French Embassy, Goethe-Institut, Istituto Italiano di Cultura, Polish Cultural Institute, Romanian Cultural Institute, and Instituto Cervantes, within the framework of EUNIC (European Union National Institutes for Culture), in collaboration with 192 Books, New York University Liberal Arts Department, the New York Public Library, Printed Matter, InTranslation, and Words without Borders.
VENUE
Printed Matter (6PM) | 192 Books (7PM)
195 Tenth Avenue
New York, NY 10011
Free admission, no tickets required.