Reading in the series Fiction Canteen in Exile

I’ll be reading from A LESSER DAY this evening at a place called ausland.

How much of our lives is contained in the places we’ve lived in? And does memory have a spatial dimension? As the narrator attempts to locate meaning in the passage of time as it inscribes itself into the myriad things around her, she discovers instances of illusion and self-deception—the flaws in human perception that reveal themselves when we examine the mechanisms of our own thinking: “The amnesia that follows, when the mind carefully buries its new discovery, only digging it up some time later when it’s certain of being alone, unobserved, turning it over and over, sniffing at it as though it were a dried-out bone.”

Together with Ben Miller and Charlotte Wührer.

Doors open at 7 p.m.

Lychenerstraße 60, 10437 Berlin

 

(Re)Reading Don DeLillo in Dark Times

Adapted from a talk given on April 28, 2017 at the New School, New York City, as part of The Body Artist: A Conference on Don DeLillo.

“Live outside your native culture long enough, and you begin to see it as a sort of double exposure in which your sense of family and identity and belonging is overlaid with a strange, shape-shifting disturbance pattern in which everything seems normal until it suddenly doesn’t, and you begin to see the country from a foreigner’s point of view. For as long as I can remember, America has enjoyed its superpower status, exporting the products of its creative industries around the globe, often through aggressive means, and showing little sustained interest in the cultures of other countries. Lawrence Venuti, the translation theorist, has spoken of ‘a trade imbalance with serious cultural ramifications’ resulting in ‘a complacency in Anglo-American relations with cultural others, a complacency that can be described—without too much exaggeration—as imperialistic abroad and xenophobic at home.’ Only a tiny percentage of all publications in the United States are works in translation, meaning that we have comparatively meager resources to examine our society and culture in comparison to other societies and cultures, and that this impedes our ability to reflect objectively on ourselves.”

Originally published in Quarterly Conversation. 

Republished by Three Quarks Daily, January 2021.