Holtzbrinck Discussion

Making Sense of (and in) Senseless Times

Novelists Paul La Farge and Jan Brandt, along with moderator Simone Schröder, jointly consider the question, How do writers of fiction make sense of a world in which familiar social structures collapse overnight, and ideas about reality are politicized in polarizing ways? They will talk about conspiracy theories, alternative facts, viral disinformation, real viruses, and other ways in which lived experience strays into the fictive — and how fiction does (and might) respond.

This event will take place via Zoom. The online audience may submit written questions during a Q&A period following the discussion.

Please note that this discussion will take place at 17:00 Central European Standard Time; 11 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time. 

Paul La Farge is the author of The Night Ocean (2017), Luminous Airplanes (2011), The Facts of Winter (2005), Haussmann, or the Distinction (2001), and The Artist of the Missing (1999). His writing has appeared in the New Yorker, Village Voice, and Harper’s, among others. In the winter term of 2016-17, La Farge was the Picador Guest Professor at the Universität Leipzig; in spring 2020 he is the Holtzbrinck Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin.

Jan Brandt is the author of Gegen die Welt (2011), which won the Nicolas Born Début Prize and was shortlisted for the German Book Prize. He is also the author of three memoirs: Death in Turn (2015), City without Angels (2016), and A House in the Country/An Apartment in the City (2019). His second novel, to be published in late 2021, is about Germans who immigrated to America.

Simone Schröder completed a PhD in comparative literature at the University of Bath and has been working with the international literature festival berlin since 2017. Her book The Nature Essay. Ecocritical Explorations, was published in 2019. Schröder is the German translator of Paul La Farge’s The Facts of Winter.