Festival NEUE LITERATUR | CONVERSATION | Small Town
The annual Festival NEUE LITERATUR brings some of the best up and coming German-speaking authors to New York, where they encounter well-known American writers in a series of conversations and readings.
This year’s edition of the festival centers on the notion of mobility in today’s increasingly globalized world. Many authors in Europe and the United States share an immigrant back-ground and write in languages that are different from what they grew up with.
The “immigrant experience” has become a common theme in many recent books of contemporary fiction. However, mobility or the lack thereof is not only experienced by authors who have arrived and struggled to establish themselves and their identities in a new and often hostile society, but also by writers who are longing to move away from their small-town provincial surroundings but feel that they are stuck and cannot leave.
Contemporary fiction lets people move from one place to another or never at all, but it shows that ultimately, mobility is a concept of our mind.
The festival starts off with the panel Small Town.
I hate being odd in a small town
If they stare let them stare in New York City
At this pink eyed painting albino
How far can my fantasy go?
John Cale / Lou Reed: “Smalltown“
German author Martin Becker and Swiss-born Lorenz Langenegger write about being stuck in the provinces and trapped in the stifling atmosphere of a small town.
The sympathetic heroes in Becker’s short stories don’t necessarily lead a “beautiful life,” but their failure in a slightly surreal world always has a humorous side.
Jakob Walter, the delightfully average protagonist in Langenegger’s debut novel Hier im Regen (Here In The Rain), asks himself one day why he is living in Bern. Even after a bizarre foray into the refreshingly exotic Locarno region he is unable to find the answer.
John Wray, an American with Austrian roots, set his first novel, The Right Hand of Sleep, in a fictitious Carinthian town called Niessen.
The plot: a WWI veteran and ex-Bolshevist returns to his homeland in 1938, when the Nazis are already in power. In contrast, Wray’s fast-paced third novel, Lowboy, takes place in subterranean Manhattan. The story revolves around William Heller, a schizophrenic sixteen-year-old who uses the confines of the subway tunnels to escape the constraints of his mind.
The authors will be in conversation with Daniela Strigl and Klaus Nüchtern.
Download the authors’ biographies here.
The Festival NEUE LITERATUR is organized by the Austrian Cultural Forum New York, the Consulate General of Switzerland in New York, the German Consulate General in New York, the German Book Office, the Goethe-Institut New York, and Deutsches Haus at NYU.
VENUE
Deutsches Haus at NYU
42 Washington Mews
New York, NY 10003
Please reserve free tickets by calling Deutsches Haus at NYU at 212 998 8660 or by e-mailing to rsvp.deutsches.haus@nyu.edu.