Festival Neue Literatur 2026 "Intimate Thresholds: Identity and Longing"
About this Event
On Monday, October 26, at 6 PM, the Festival Neue Literatur partners present "Intimate Thresholds: Identity and Longing," a conversation between the authors Julia Franck and Nicole Krauss about their novels Worlds Apart and To Be a Man. The conversation will be moderated by the author and literary translator Tess Lewis.
How do our desires shape our worlds? What influence does history have on our longings? Why are loss and grief such creatively generative forces? In this thought-provoking exchange of ideas, writers Julia Franck and Nicole Krauss will read from their work and discuss the ways we struggle to achieve a sense of ourselves both because of and despite the social, historical, and emotional forces to which we are subject.
About
Born in East Berlin, Julia is eight when her actress mother uproots her family of four girls, by different fathers, heading West in search of a better life. Their eventual landing in the remote countryside of Schleswig-Holstein solves no problems for this fractured household. Desperate to escape a childhood of rural poverty, neglect and shame, the lonely child becomes addicted to writing. Aged 13, she leaves her family. At school in West Berlin, she finally encounters love. In this gripping novel based on her youthful diaries and early life, Julia Franck shows why and how a great writer found her voice.
This “astonishing chronicle of recent German history” (Julia Pascal), “seamlessly translated” by Imogen Taylor has been described by historian and journalist Katja Hoyer as “one of those books that involves you both intellectually and emotionally.” It is “one of the most bizarre life stories I have ever come across’ yet also “moments of humour, curiosity and desire surface. At times I laughed out loud …” Julia Franck’s powerful novels of family and motherhood delve deep into the nation’s tumultuous past. Her work has won numerous prizes; her novel Blind Side of the Heart won the German Book Prize 2007, was translated into over 40 languages, filmed and has sold over a million copies in Germany alone. She lives in Berlin.
About :
In one of her most accomplished books yet, Nicole Krauss plunges fearlessly into the struggle to understand what it is to be a man and what it is to be a woman, and the arising tensions that have existed in all relationships from the very beginning of time. Set in our contemporary moment, and moving across the globe from Switzerland, Japan, and New York City to Tel Aviv, Los Angeles, and South America, the stories in To Be a Man feature male characters as fathers, lovers, friends, children, seducers, and even a lost husband who may never have been a husband at all.
The way these stories mirror one other and resonate is beautiful, with a balance so finely tuned that the book almost feels like a novel. Echoes ring through stages of life: aging parents and new-born babies; young women’s coming of age and the newfound, somewhat bewildering sexual power that accompanies it; generational gaps and unexpected deliveries of strange new leases on life; mystery and wonder at a life lived or a future waiting to unfold. To Be a Man illuminates with a fierce, unwavering light the forces driving human existence: sex, power, violence, passion, self-discovery, growing older. Profound, poignant, and brilliant, Krauss’s stories are at once startling and deeply moving, but always revealing of all-too-human weakness and strength.
Participating speakers:
has been called “one of American’s most important novelists and an international literary sensation” by the New York Times, “a contemporary master,” by Esquire, and “one of American’s greatest writers” by the Financial Times. She is the author of Man Walks Into a Room, Forest Dark, Great House and The History of Love and the short story collection To Be a Man. She was the inaugural writer-in-residence at the Zuckerman Mind, Brain and Behavior Institute at Columbia University, and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy in Berlin, and the Cullman Center at the New York Public Library. Her new novel, Vita, will be published in September 2027.
is the author of nine books, novels and nonfiction, among them her German Book Prize winning novel Blindness of the Heart (2008, translated by Anthea Bell), a memoir, Worlds Apart (2026, translated by Imogen Taylor) and, most recently, a biography about Rilke’s last lover, Baladine Klossowska, I am Drowning in the Waters of my Love. She writes literary essays on art and dance, and biographical and critical texts about literature.
translations include works by Peter Handke, Walter Benjamin, Montaigne, Ingeborg Bachmann, Lutz Seiler, and Anne Weber. Her essays and reviews have appeared in journals and newspapers including The American Scholar, The Wall Street Journal, Partisan Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Miami Herald, Bookforum, World Literature Today, and The Hudson Review. Tess Lewis was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2016. She was a 2021-22 Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin and a 2023-24 Scholar of Note at the American Library in Paris. In 2023, She received the Friedrich Ulfers Prize, which recognizes those who champion the advancement of German-language literature in the U.S.
About Festival Neue Literatur:
Festival Neue Literatur (FNL) was established in 2009 as a collaborative project of New York’s leading German-language cultural institutions, i.e. The Austrian Cultural Forum New York; the German Consulate General New York; the Consulate General of Switzerland in New York; Columbia University School of the Arts; Deutsches Haus at NYU; and the Goethe-Institut New York. Festival Neue Literatur is the first and only festival to spotlight German-language and U.S fiction together and is proud to provide New York audiences with access to exciting new literature from Austria, Germany, Switzerland, and the U.S.
The festival is presented with additional support from the German Federal Foreign Office, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia, and the Frankfurt Book Fair.
Where is it happening?
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