EUROPEAN BOOK CLUB | GERMAN BOOK CLUB SESSION

The Goethe-Institut New York will host this session of a German Book Club evening. The book discussed will be Visitation, by German author Jenny Erpenbeck. The book was translated by Susan Bernofsky and has been published by New Directions.

Jenny Erpenbeck was born in East Berlin in 1967, the granddaughter of authors and the daughter of a physicist/author and a translator. She studied drama and musical theater direction with, a.o., Ruth Berghaus and Werner Herzog, and has worked on opera and musical productions since 1991. In the 1990s she published her first stories and plays, debuting in 1999 with her story collection, Geschichte vom alten Kind (The Old Child and Other Tales, New Directions, 2005). A second collection of stories, Tand, appeared in 2001, followed by the novella Wörterbuch (Book of Words, New Directions, 2007), a collection of columns, Dinge, die verschwinden, and the novel Heimsuchung (Visitation, New Directions, 2010), with all English translations by Susan Bernofsky. Among her literary honors are the Ingeborg Bachmann Jury Prize, the Heimito von Doderer Prize, and the LiteraTour Nord Prize. Her books of fiction have been translated worldwide. Jenny Erpenbeck lives as a freelance author and director in Berlin and Graz.

“Indeed, the amount of emotional engagement Erpenbeck manages to win from us, in a mere 150 pages, is just one proof of her mastery. In marked contrast to the unearned love that inflated novels so often demand, Visitation allows us to feel we’ve known real individuals, experienced the slow unfolding of history, and bonded unconditionally with a place, without authorial pestering or pathos-cranking.” – The Guardian

VENUE
Goethe-Institut New York
72 Spring Street, 11th Floor
New York, NY 10012

To register for this event, or to receive further information, please send an e-mail to: germany.nyc@europeanbookclub.orgtypo3/mailto:library@acfny.org