PANEL DISCUSSION | Festival NEUE LITERATUR | The Future of the Novel
Stop by the powerHouse Arena for what is sure to be a riveting literary discussion. Two novelists from Austria (Andrea Winkler and Andrea Grill) and one from Switzerland (Peter Weber) join American novelist Rivka Galchen (Atmospheric Disturbances, 2009) to discuss the continuing potentials of the novel, from the perspective of our contemporary techno-mediacracy.
Andrea Grill (The Beautiful and the Necessary, 2010), Peter Weber (The Years without Melody, 2007), and Andrea Winkler (Hanna and I, 2008) are prizewinning authors writing in German who, each in their own way, have determined new possibilities for the structure, form, and effects of novel writing. In an epoch when the genre seems imperiled by a thousand threats, Grill discovers a new aesthetic for transnational capitalism in a coffee fermented in the digestive system of a mongoose. Weber hears a new music for prose in the boom of industrial music in Germany in the 1980s. Winkler reopens the wounds-made-narrative by writers like Ingeborg Bachmann and Samuel Beckett. These things – a capitalist aesthetic, prose’s new musical potentials, and the end of narrative (again) – and more will be discussed.
The second annual Festival NEUE LITERATUR brings six of the best up-and-coming German-language authors to New York, where they join well-known American writers in a series of conversations and readings.
The Festival NEUE LITERATUR is organized by the Austrian Cultural Forum New York, the Goethe-Institut New York, the Deutsches Haus at NYU, the German Book Office, the German Consulate in New York, the Swiss Consulate and the curators Susan Bernofsky and Paul North.
For more information about the festival, please visit www.festivalneueliteratur.org or follow us on Facebook.
Andrea Winkler was born in Freistadt in 1972, and studied German Literature and Theater. She has received a number of literary awards, among them the Abraham Woursell Award and the Förderungspreis der Republik Österreich. Her publications include: Schatten(spiele): Poetologische Denkwege zu Friederike Mayröcker (2004), Arme Närrchen: Selbstgespräche (2006), Hanna und ich (2008), and Drei, vier Töne, nicht mehr: Elf Rufe (Zsolnay, 2010). Andrea Winkler lives in Vienna.
Andrea Grill was born in Bad Ischl in 1975 and studied in Salzburg before earning her doctorate at the University of Amsterdam with a dissertation on “The Evolution of Butterflies Common to Sardinia.” Her essays, stories, and poetry have appeared in newspapers and journals. She has published three novels: Zweischritt (2007), Tränenlachen (2008), and Das Schöne und das Notwendige (2011). Grill also translates from Albanian into German. She has lived in Tirana, Cagliari (Sardinia), Neuchatel und Bologna, and today resides in Vienna.
Peter Weber was an accomplished athlete while in school, but, following an accident when he was 19, he began to write. His latest novel, Die melodielosen Jahre (2007), was awarded the Solothurner Literature Prize.
Rivka Galchen is the author of Atmospheric Disturbances, which won the William J. Saroyan International Prize for Fiction. Her stories and essays have appeared in publications including Harper’s, The Believer, The New Yorker, and The New York Times, and she was recently named to The New Yorker’s list of 20 notable writers under 40.
Photos from the event by Susanne Kirchgasser.
VENUE
The powerHouse Arena
37 Main Street
Brooklyn, NY 11201
Please RSVP: rsvp@powerhousearena.com
For more information, please contact Lena Valencia at 718.666.3049 or send an email to lena@powerHouseArena.com
Free admission.