Festival Neue Literatur 2018: "The Lives of Others: Stories from Outside Our Bubble"

About "The Lives of Others: Stories from Outside our Bubble:"

What does it mean to be marginalized – and who decides where the supposed center is in a shifting world? In this panel we discuss politics, power, society, ethnicity, and family, asking questions about how we treat those different from us and how society acts towards its most vulnerable members. This panel will explore how writers go about depicting people who live on the fringes with sensitivity, how personal experience informs fiction, and how novels about people who are considered marginal are both celebrated and – sometimes – misunderstood.

Featuring Fatma Aydemir, Ursula Fricker, Atticus Lish, Robert Prosser and moderated by Karen Philips, Executive Director of Words Without Borders.

The event is free of charge and in English. RSVPs are required due to limited seating. Please register here.

About Festival Neue Literatur (March 23-25):

Festival Neue Literatur brings New York audiences new writing from Austria, Germany, Switzerland, and the United States, as the first and only festival to spotlight German-language and American fiction. The 2018 festival invites our authors to tackle questions of identity and belonging in a fracturing Europe and beyond, using race, religion, immigration, status, politics, and even football hooliganism as lenses to explore contemporary society and the recent past. Join us! 

The works featured at this year’s festival range widely in setting and theme, but are all centered on stories that might be deemed peripheral by the mainstream. From the rebellious ennui of a Turkish German woman whose visit to fabled Berlin club Berghain upends her life, to the lives of two lovers torn apart by the conflict in Bosnia, to the intersecting lives of an activist, sex worker, and high-level politician around the closing of a refugee camp, to the unlikely love story of a returning U.S. Marine and an undocumented half-Chinese half-Uighur woman, the stories celebrate the diversity of human experiences in a globalized world. At a time when bans and walls threaten to divide in the U.S., and when rising far-right extremism haunts Europe, this edition of FNL celebrates the power of fiction to allow each of us to intimately experience lives different from our own. When we read, we build empathy, we educate ourselves, and perhaps even change the way we move in the world. We are thrilled to celebrate this crucial gift that writers give us. We need them now more than ever. 

The 2018 festival, which is curated by acclaimed editor Peter Blackstock, features the following authors:  Nava Ebrahimi and Robert Prosser (Austria), Fatma Aydemir and Philipp Winkler (Germany), Ursula Fricker and Meral Kureyshi (Switzerland), and Lisa Ko and Atticus Lish (U.S.).

Each year, the festival also produces a reader featuring book summaries and sample translations of the featured German-language works. The 2018 reader will be available for download in an electronic version on the festival website shortly.

All events are free of charge and held in English. | Facebook

Festival Neue Literatur was established as a collaborative project of New York’s leading German-language cultural institutions: the Austrian Cultural Forum, the Consulate General of Germany, the Consulate General of Switzerland, Deutsches Haus at Columbia University, Deutsches Haus at NYU, the Frankfurt Book Fair New York Inc., Goethe-Institut New York, and Pro Helvetia.

Festival Neue Literatur 2018 is made possible through generous support from BMW of North America, the German Foreign Office, and Radeberger Gruppe.