ACF LITERATURE PROGRAM
Thursday, January 24 | 7:30 pm
Book presentation and panel discussion
FRED WANDER | THE SEVENTH WELL
In 1938, Fred Wander left his mother and sister behind in Vienna and fled on foot to France, where he was later put on a train to Auschwitz. Transported from camp to camp, he was haunted for twenty-five years by the crystalline, episodic stories that chronicle the plight of his fellow inmates. Only after the tragic death of his little daughter did these voices pour forth.
The Seventh Well is an artistic testament to humanity during the Holocaust - the depths of inhumanity - and gives individual faces and names to the often anonymous victims of the death camps. Wander's novel is a crucial and important work of art that reaffirms, as Hofmann writes in the afterword, "the indestructibility of the human spirit."
This literary evening at the Austrian Cultural Forum commemorates the life of the late Austrian writer Fred Wander (1917-2006), including an examination of his posthumous novel, The Seventh Well. Originally published in East Germany in 1970, this masterpiece is finally being published by W. W. Norton in a translation by Michael Hofmann, award-winning translator of Joseph Roth, Berthold Brecht, and Franz Kafka.
The event is organized by the Austrian Cultural Forum and W. W. Norton & Company. The book presentation and panel discussion will be followed by a reception. The translator Michael Hofmann, Edward Hirsch from the Guggenheim Foundation, Thane Rosenbaum, a novelist, and Alana Newhouse from The Forward will participate in a panel discussion. The presentation and discussion will be followed by a reception.
The Seventh Well
by Fred Wander
A Novel
translated by Michael Hofmann
192 pages, $23,95,
W.W. Norton & Company, New York
Saturday | March 8 | 7:30 pm
Reading
KRAUTGARDEN at the ACF: Festival for young German-language and American literature, with Austrian author Thomas Glavinic.
Thomas Glavinic, one of the rising stars among young Austrian writers, will be reading excerpts from his translated work into English (see interview). He will be joined by an American author (to be announced).
The Krautgarden Festival presents up-and-coming young German-language and American authors at prominent venues in both New York and Leipzig. The festival runs parallel to the annual Leipzig Book Fair in March.
The Austrian Cultural Forum will join the KRAUTGARDEN Festival for the first time in 2008.
