Weekends on the Island: Anna Weidenholzer and Tess Lewis

Friday 22 January, 2016
6:30pm, $0

New York University, Deutsches Haus
42 Washington Mews

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Deutsches Haus at NYU presents a reading by the author and current writer-in-residence at Deutsches Haus at NYU Anna Weidenholzer from her recent fiction, followed by a conversation with the acclaimed translator Tess Lewis

"Anna Weidenholzer has an acute feel for the absurdities of the world and the expectations placed on us, and for people who struggle their whole lives yet are seldom rewarded. She does not write with an overbearing ruthlessness, but with a rare degree of empathy and delicacy. That’s precisely why her writing gets under your skin." Peter Henisch

Critics have been lamenting the disappearance of fiction with characters from the working class or from the ranks of the unemployed and destitute. Anna Weidenholzer, however, beautifully fills that void. Her recent story Islandfeatures a hapless amateur magician and a besotted real estate agent who spend their weekends on the Danube Island, Vienna’s favorite bathing spot.  In her exquisitely understated novel, Winter is Good for Fish, she portrays a middle-aged woman in Vienna coming to terms with being labeled redundant—both as a "productive" wage-earner and as a widow. This novel offers an unsentimental look at loneliness, unfulfilled dreams, and the sense of being overwhelmed by life—but does so with a sly and subtle sense of humor.

Anna Weidenholzer was born in 1984 in Linz and lives in Vienna. She studied Comparative Literature in Vienna and Wroclaw, Poland. Weidenholzer has been published in numerous literary magazines and anthologies and has won many awards, including the Alfred Gesswein Prize (2009), the Residency Stipend at the Schloss Wiepersdorf (2011), the State Grant for Literature (2011/2012), and the Reinhard Priessnitz Prize (2013). In 2012, she was writer in residence in the city of Kitzbühel. Her debut novel Der Platz des Hundes (The Dog’s Place, 2010) was nominated for the European Festival of the Debut Novel in Kiel in 2011. Her second novel Der Winter tut den Fischen gut was nominated for the Leipzig Book Fair Prize in fiction in 2013 and was featured at the New York Festival Neue Literatur in 2015. She currently is the Max Kade writer-in-residence at Deutsches Haus at NYU. Read the following Redux interview with Anna Weidenholzer here.

Tess Lewis’s translations from French and German include works by 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 CriterionThe Hudson ReviewWorld Literature TodayThe American Scholar, and Bookforum.

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