Festival NEUE LITERATUR | CONVERSATION A House is Not a Home MONDAY MAR 08, 06:00 PM - 08:00 PM |
In the conversation A House is Not a Home, Rivka Galchen, Olga Flor, and Julya Rabinowich analyze the experience of not feeling quite at home in the place where we live and our yearning for security and well-being despite all outward success. The panel will be led by Daniela Strigl.
A room is still a room
Even when there's nothing there but gloom;
But a room is not a house,
And a house is not a home
When the two of us are far apart
And one of us has a broken heart
Burt Bacharach / Hal David: “A House Is Not a Home”
Another group of novels explores the experience of not feeling quite at home in the place where we live and our yearning for security and well-being despite all outward success.
In her mesmerizing first novel Atmospheric Disturbances, Canadian-born Rivka Galchen tells the tale of a psychiatrist who one day believes his wife is actually a double. Does he have a psychosis, or is it an attempt to deal with conjugal love?
Mischka, the youthful heroine of the eponymous debut novel by Julya Rabinowich, suffers from a split personality: born in Leningrad, she and her family are transplanted from a Jewish community of artists to 1970s Vienna, where life in the ostensibly “golden West” puts her parents’ marriage to test.
Graz-based Olga Flor lets the characters in her many-voiced novel Kollateralschaden (Collateral Damages) meet in the agora of the present – a supermarket in which exactly one hour will pass until something dramatic will happen because of the hysteric reaction of a fearful society that lives for consumption.
Download the authors' biographies here.
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 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.
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