Peter Wortsman, translator of Konundrum: Selected Prose of Franz Kafka, will be joined by Tess Lewis, translator most recently of Angel of Oblivion, at the NYU Deustches Haus for a reading and evening of conversation about Konundrum, the art of translation, and all things Kafkaesque.  If you missed our recent event at Community Bookstore to celebrate the publication of Konundrum, this is your second chance to be a part of a wide ranging and stimulating conversation.

Copies of the book will be available for purchase at the event.

Events at Deutsches Haus are free and open to the public, but because seating is limited, you should RSVP to deutscheshaus.rsvp@nyu.edu and plan to arrive 10 minutes before the event begins to ensure a good seat.  You can view the event page here.

Peter Wortsman was a Fulbright Fellow in 1973, a Thomas J. Watson Foundation Fellow in 1974, and a Holtzbrinck Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin in 2010. His writing has been honored with the 1985 Beard’s Fund Short Story Award, the 2008 Gertje Potash-Suhr Prosapreis of the Society for Contemporary American Literature in German, the 2012 Gold Grand Prize for Best Travel Story of the Year in the Solas Awards Competition, and a 2014 Independent Publishers Book Award (IPPY). His travel reflections were selected five years in a row, 2008-2012, and again in 2016, for inclusion in The Best Travel Writing. He is the author of two books of short fiction, A Modern Way to Die (1991) and Footprints in Wet Cement (forthcoming 2017), the plays The Tattooed Man Tells All (2000) and Burning Words (2006), and the travel memoirGhost Dance in Berlin: A Rhapsody in Gray (2013), and the novel Cold Earth Wanderers (2014). Wortsman’s numerous translations from the German includeTelegrams of the Soul: Selected Prose of Peter Altenberg, Travel Pictures by Heinrich Heine, Posthumous Papers of a Living Author by Robert Musil, Peter Schlemiel, The Man Who Sold His Shadow by Adelbert von Chamisso, andSelected Prose of Heinrich von Kleist, many of which are published by Archipelago Books. He edited and translated an anthology, Tales of the German Imagination: From the Brothers Grimm to Ingeborg Bachmann, from Penguin Classics. He works as a medical and travel journalist.

Tess Lewis’ translations from French and German include works by Maja Haderlap, Peter Handke, Alois Hotschnig, Melinda Nadj Abonji, Philippe Jaccottet, and the painter Anselm Kiefer. Her recent awards include a Max Geilinger Award, the Austrian Cultural Forum NY Translation Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.  She also serves as an Advisory Editor for The Hudson Review and writes essays on European literature for a number of journals and newspapers including The New Criterion, The Hudson Review, World Literature Today, The American Scholar, and Bookforum.