Wednesday, April 30

8-9:30 PM
Public Lives/Private Lives

Town Hall
123 West 43rd Street

Participants: Michael Ondaatje, Annie Proulx, A. B. Yehoshua, Péter Esterházy, Rian Malan, Evelyn Schlag, Ian McEwan, and PEN president Francine Prose.

What do we know about writers? That their creativity often comes from the most private and fiercely guarded places? That they're often thrust into public roles, either by choice or circumstance? Join PEN for the opening night of the 2008 World Voices festival, as some of the world's most beloved and illustrious writers - novelists, journalists, poets and essayists - peel back the layers of their literary selves in a rare group appearance at Town Hall. Introduced by PEN World Voices chair Salman Rushdie, the program will feature readings by Michael Ondaatje, Annie Proulx, A. B. Yehoshua, Péter Esterházy, Coral Bracho, Rian Malan, Evelyn Schlag, Ian McEwan, and PEN president Francine Prose.

$15/$10 PEN members at ticketmaster: www.ticketmaster.com or 212.307.4100
Town Hall Box Office: 212.840.2824



Thursday, May 1
7-8.30 p.m. The Art of Failure

Austrian Cultural Forum
11 East 52nd Street
 
"Fundamentally we are capable of everything, equally fundamentally we fail at everything, he said, I thought." - Thomas Bernhard, The Loser
 
Austrian novelist, playwright, and poet Thomas Bernhard (1931-1989) said that an attempt to adequately express a truth - like any artistic or other human endeavor - was doomed to failure. But, in a fitting paradox, he said it in some of the most commanding narratives of modern literature. Bernhard's gleeful embrace of exaggeration, repetition, and contradiction dramatizes the mind's confinement within language so perfectly that he gives an enthralling sense of conquering it - a false sense, he would be the first to suggest. "Bernhardian" deserves to join "Kafkaesque" among English terms eulogizing the individual fated to be conscious in the 20th century.
 
Bernhard's strenuous confrontation with the futility of seeking to satisfactorily complete - or even begin - a written work has made him a stern yet liberating influence on writers around the world who think critically about their art and realistically about its place in modern societies. Join us for this discussion of Bernhard's work and his exaltation of artistic failure.
 
The panelists are: Paul Holdengräber, Director of Public Programs at The New York Public Library; novelist and critic Dale Peck; novelist Horacio Castellanos Moya, author of Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador; and Fatima Naqvi, Associate Professor of German at Rutgers University. Moderated by Jonathan Taylor.
 
Free and open to the public. However, reservations are required.
Please call ACF's reservation line at (212) 319 5300 ext. 222 or email reservations@acfny.org.

Friday, May 2
1:30-2:30 PM

Readings from Around the Globe

Austrian Cultural Forum
11 East 52nd Street

Participants: Daniel Kehlmann, Kristín Ómarsdóttir, Ana Castillo, and Nina Revoyr.

Join us for an eclectic group reading that weaves together stories spanning centuries, continents, and genres. Daniel Kehlmann is the best-selling author of Measuring the World and a leading light of the "new" German fiction. Icelandic poet, playwright, and novelist Kristín Ómarsdóttir is the author, most recently, of the play Tell Me Everything, which probes the borders between dreams and reality. "Xicana" author Ana Castillo (The Guardians, So Far From God) has been crossing frontiers for years - specifically, the troubled physical and psychic landscape separating the U.S. and Mexico. And Nina Revoyr is the author of gritty West Coast noirs Southland and The Age of Dreaming, which straddle black and Japanese subcultures in mid-century Los Angeles.

Free and open to the public. However, reservations are required.
Please call ACF's reservation line at (212) 319 5300 ext. 222 or email reservations@acfny.org



3:30-5:00 PM
Crossing Borders

Instituto Cervantes New York
211-215 East 49th Street

Participants Ana Castillo, Daniel Kehlmann, Lieve Joris, and Gonçalo M. Tavares. Moderated by Lila Azam Zanganeh.

A discussion about boundaries - both physical and psychological - and a journey across borders and into the cartography of many different lands with Daniel Kehlmann (whose novel Measuring the World is the best-selling novel in German since Patrick Süskind's Perfume), Lieve Joris (one of Europe's leading travel writers, who has written widely of her journeys in the Middle East and Africa), and novelist Gonçalo M. Tavares, who also teaches the theory of knowledge at the University of Lisbon. They'll be joined by Le Monde's Lila Azam Zanganeh.

Free and open to the public. No reservations.
Cosponsored by Instituto Cervantes and the Consulate General of Spain



5:30-6:30 PM
Leaving Home

Austrian Cultural Forum
11 East 52nd Street

Participants: Dinaw Mengestu, György Dragomán, and Sasa Stanisic. Moderated by Irina Reyn.

Guernica, a magazine of art and politics, hosts a panel with debut novelists Dinaw Mengestu, György Dragomán, and Sasa Stanisic, whose narrators recount escaping violence in their home countries only to be fraught with feelings of ambivalence in their adopted countries. Moderated by Irina Reyn, whose debut novel, What Happened to Anna K., will be published in August, the panel will explore a range of topics, including children as witnesses, the status of exile, and the role of fiction as a voice for multiculturalism.

Free and open to the public. However, reservations are required.
Please call ACF's reservation line at (212) 319 5300 ext. 222 or email reservations@acfny.org

Saturday, May 3

3-4:30 PM
Fractures: Psychic Rifts/Writerly Riffs

French Institute Alliance Française
Le Skyroom / 22 East 60th Street

Participants: Young Ha Kim, Evelyn Schlag, Anja Sicking, and Amanda Michalopoulou. Moderated by Victoria Redel.

Fragmentation, alienation, mental anguish and collapse - how are the private woes of modern life expressed in the works of contemporary writers? Join us for a literary therapy session-of-sorts, with South Korean author Young Ha Kim, whose novel, I Have the Right to Destroy Myself, epitomized the anomie of 90s-era Seoul; acclaimed Austrian poet and essayist Evelyn Schlag, who's been called "one of the most distinctive and subtle voices in contemporary German-language writing"; Dutch novelist Ana Sicking, author of The Silent Sin, a tale of music, obsession, and desire; and Greek author Amanda Michalopoulou, whose book of stories, I'd Like, seeks salvation in the act of writing itself. Moderated by Victoria Redel, author of The Border of Truth and Where the Road Bottoms Out, among other works.

$12 Non-Members/$8 FIAF/PEN Members/students www.Ticketmaster.com or 212.307.4100
Cosponsored by the French Institute Alliance Française



Sunday, May 4

2 PM
A Conversation with Jeffrey Eugenides and Daniel Kehlmann

The New York Public Library
South Court Auditorium
Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street
Humanities and Social Sciences Library

Referring to Jeffrey Eugenides's novel Middlesex, The New York Times Book Review said, "The book's length feels like its author's arms stretching farther and farther to encompass more people, more life - but mostly it is a colossal act of curiosity, of imagination, and of love." Daniel Kehlmann's Measuring the World was hailed as "ravishing" by the German paper Der Spiegel. Both authors' books were runaway international best-sellers and today they come together, admirers of each other's work, to talk about making fiction from fact and much more.

$15/$10 PEN Members, library donors, seniors, and students with valid identification www.smarttix.com or 212.868.4444
Cosponsored by LIVE from the NYPL (www.nypl.org/live)

For more information, please visit www.pen.org/festival