Julia Kornberg in conversation with Mauro Javier Cardenas

Julia Kornberg in conversation with Mauro Javier Cardenas

City Lights celebrates the publication of

Berlin Atomized

By Julia Kornberg

Published by Astra House

A kinetic, globetrotting novel following three siblings—Jewish and downwardly mobile—from 2001 to 2034, as they come of age against the major crises of the 21st century.

Berlin Atomized begins in Buenos Aires of the early 2000s with the self-baptisms of Nina Goldstein. She bathes too frequently, washing with fervor and repeating: “I am not asleep.” She grows up partying and taking undeserved siestas, while her eldest brother Jeremías is drawn into the city’s powder keg music scene, and the middle sibling, Mateo, learns of his terminal illness and prepares to join the IDF. Though Argentina faces the worst economic crisis in its history, the Goldsteins are being reared in a newly developed gated community that displaces working class families. Each sibling rehearses their escape from the capitalist Eden of their birth, unaware that the gated community will soon be underwater, and their family scattered all over the earth.

The second half of the novel takes place between 2018 and 2035, invoking and imagining possible futures for this existence in migration. Jeremías lives in Paris until an undeclared war destroys the city, and Nina, after tracing Mateo’s last steps to his death in Tel Aviv, ends up in Berlin, where the European Union is found in the shambles of its own history. From Punta del Este to Paris, Berlin to Jerusalem, Brussels to Tokyo, the novel progresses into a dire near future of constant flight and fire as the siblings search for one another.

Defiant and dexterous, percussive and percolating with violent light, Berlin Atomized is Julia Kornberg’s napalm-ic debut—a tale about the end of the world, as told by the clear-eyed youth to which that world had been promised.

Julia Kornberg was born in Buenos Aires in 1996 and lives in New York City. Her work has been published in The New York Review of Books, The Jewish Review of Books, The Drift, Bookforum, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, and The Baffler, amongst other publications. She is a candidate in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese studying the role of translation and translation theory in modern and contemporary Latin America. During her IHUM fellowship, Julia will work on the self-translation of her unpublished second novel, Las Fiestas, under the guidance of Bosnian American writer Aleksandr Hemon.

Mauro Javier Cárdenas grew up in Guayaquil, Ecuador, and graduated with a degree in Economics from Stanford University. He's the author of American Abductions (Dalkey, 2024) Aphasia (FSG, 2020) and The Revolutionaries Try Again (Coffee House Press, 2016). In 2016 he received a Joseph Henry Jackson Award and in 2017 the Hay Festival included him in Bogota 39, a selection of the best young Latin American novelists.

Praise for Berlin Atomized

“Capturing a lost generation that feels both timeless and particular in its ironic fatalism and its various intellectual, artistic, and political responses to a broken world, this novel will be of interest to the international literary community. / A striking debut from a new global voice.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Argentine writer Kornberg debuts with an evocative portrait of disaffected youth and an unsettling, war-torn near future . . . Readers will look forward to seeing what Kornberg does next.”—Publishers Weekly

“Remarkable, tender, funny…[Berlin Atomized is] a novel in fragments floating in the great events of immanent youth.” —Pola Oloixarac, author of Mona

“A punk song of lost innocence and the madness of history, this brilliant debut brings a new name, and a potent style, to the table: Julia Kornberg.” —Carlos Fonseca, author of Austral

“Ironic and always brilliant, tender and at the same time ruthless, with dazzling intelligence and whip-like sentences that showcase truth in every paragraph, this novel by Julia Kornberg imagines, invokes and exorcises the ghosts of her generation.” —Federico Falco, author of A Perfect Cemetery

This event is made possible by support from the City Lights Foundation

Host or Publisher City Lights Booksellers & Publishers