Recently declared “a triumph, a gem of postwar literature” (Becca Rothfeld, The New Yorker) and “one of the great reading experiences of my life” (Dustin Illingworth, The New York Times), Wolfgang Koeppen’s Trilogy of Failure—Pigeons on the Grass, The Hothouse, and Death in Rome—has finally returned in Michael Hofmann’s breathtaking translation.
Please join New Directions to honor the trilogy and the anniversary of Koeppen’s 120th year at two special events in New York City:
On May 6, Michael Hofmann with Joshua Cohen at Rizzoli Bookstore
When: Wednesday, May 6 at 6pm
Where: Rizzoli Bookstore, 1133 Broadway, NY, NY
Register here
On May 7, Michael Hofmann with Andrew Martin at Community Bookstore
When: May 7 at 7pm
Where: Community Bookstore, 143 7th Ave, Brooklyn, NYRegister here
The poet Michael Hofmann's awards for translation include the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Prize, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize, the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize, the Schlegel-Tieck Prize (four times), and the American Academy's Thornton Wilder Prize in Translation.
Joshua Cohen is the author of six novels, one collection of short fiction, and one collection of nonfiction. Called "a major American writer" by the New York Times, and "an extraordinary prose stylist, surely one of the most prodigious at work in American fiction today" by the New Yorker, Cohen was awarded the 2013 Matanel Prize, and in 2017 was named one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists. The Netanyahus won the 2021 National Jewish Book Award for Fiction and the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Andrew Martin is the author of the novel Early Work, a New York Times Notable book of 2018, the story collection Cool for America, which was long-listed for the 2020 Story Prize, and the recently published novel Down Time. His fiction has been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Harper's, The Atlantic, and The Yale Review, and he is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books.
Published