Book Reading & Discussion. Christian Kracht and Daniel Bowles

Swiss author Christian Kracht to read and discuss his novels Die Toten (German) and Imperium (English).
(conversation in German and English)

April 5, 2017, 6pm
Sudler Hall, WLH 201 William Harkness Hall
100 Wall Street
 

This talk is made possible through the generosity of the The Woodward Fund at Yale University, Pro Helvetia, the Swiss Consulate in New York City, and the Yale German Department.

The Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures hosts one of the most renowned contemporary germanophone authors, Christian Kracht, to read and discuss his latest books, Die Toten, and Imperium. He will be accompanied by the English translator of Imperium, Daniel Bowles, who is teaching at Boston College.

The event is free and open to the public. The reading and discussion will be of particular interest to all undergraduate students in the German language program, with tie-ins to in-class work. Kracht is a figure of great prominence, of interest to the German Department faculty, graduate students, as well as comparative literature and the wider community at Yale. The reading will be partly in German and partly in English. Discussion will be held in English.

Christian Kracht is a contemporary Swiss novelist and journalist. He worked for some of the most important German newspapers, like Der Spiegel, Welt am Sonntag, and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. He is the author of five novels, and several other book projects, and edited volumes together with different authors. His books have been translated into 27 languages. His novels include Faserland, 1979, I Will Be Here in Sunshine and in Shadow, Imperium, and Die Toten. Imperium was the recipient of the 2012 Wilhelm Raabe literature prize, and Die Toten just won the most prestigious Swiss book prize. Kracht graduated from Lakefield College School in Lakefield, Ontario, and Sarah Lawrence College in New York. He is married to German film director Frauke Finsterwalder who directed several documentaries and gained an international reputation with the 2013 award winning feature film Finsterworld.

An Assistant Professor of German Studies at Boston College, Daniel Bowles researches and teaches twentieth-century and contemporary German literature, culture, and history. His first book, The Ends of Satire: Legacies of Satire in Postwar German Writing, appeared in 2015 with De Gruyter. He has also published translations of novels by Thomas Meinecke and Christian Kracht and short texts by Alexander Kluge, Rainald Goetz, and Xaver Bayer. For his translation of Christian Kracht’s Imperium, Bowles received the 2016 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize.

Novel Imperium. A Fiction of the South Seas (English Translation)

In 1902, a radical vegetarian and nudist from Nuremberg named August Engelhardt set sail for what was then called the Bismarck Archipelago. His destination: the island of Kabakon. His goal: to establish a colony based on worship of the sun and coconuts. His malnourished body was found on the beach on Kabakon in 1919; he was forty-three years old.

In his first novel to be translated into English, internationally bestselling author Christian Kracht uses the outlandish details of Engelhardt’s life to craft a fable about the allure of extremism and its fundamental foolishness. “A Melvillean masterpiece of the South Seas” (Jonathan Sturgeon, Flavorwire), Imperium is funny, bizarre, shocking, and poignant—sometimes all on the same page.

Daniel Bowles was awarded the 2016 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize for his translation of „Imperium. A Fiction of the South Seas.“

In: http://us.macmillan.com/imperium/christiankracht

Winner of the Wilhelm Raabe Literature Prize

On the long list for the 2017 International Dublin Literary Award…

One of Publishers Weekly’s Ten Best Books of 2015

A Huffington Post Best Fiction Book of the Year

Novel Die Toten

The reincarnation of the gothic novel out of the spirit of the cinema:

Christian Kracht’s latest novel “Die Toten” takes place in the middle of the blazing, feverish years of the Weimar Republic, where modern German culture, particularly film culture, came into bloom. In Berlin, “the spleen of an insecure, uptight, unstable nation,” a Swiss film director—spurred on by Siegfried Kracauer and Lotte Eisner—tries to convince UFA-tycoon Alfred Hugenberg to finance the production of a gothic movie in Japan. At the same time, in the kingdom of Japan, planning was underway to cooperate with the Weimar Republic and resist the rising Hollywood cinema…

The novel celebrates—in magical language—the motion picture and its masters, from Murnau to Lang, as the art form of modernity. It also celebrates the artist’s longing for transcendence and salvation, and memory as a source of our ego. It is a novel about the ghosts that continually haunt us, whether we like it or not.

(Translation of the book description from the publisher’s homepage: http://www.kiwi-verlag.de/buch/die-toten/978-3-462-04554-3/)

Winner of the Swiss Book Prize 2016

Winner of the Hermann-Hesse-Prize 2016

Nominated for the Bavarian Book Prize