December 10: László Krasznahorkai—Herscht 07769
Presented by 192 Books and Paula Cooper Gallery, László Krasznahorkai in conversation with Hari Kunzru to discuss his new book Herscht 07769 (New Directions, 2024), with a performance by Viktor Lois and a special guest reader
This event will take place in person at Paula Cooper Gallery at 534 West 21st Street on Tuesday, December 10th at 7:00 PM ET. Seating is limited. RSVP for free here. The discussion will also be streamed directly on this page. There is no login required. A recording will be archived.
Books will be available for sale after the conversation.
László Krasznahorkai—Herscht 07769 (tr. Ottilie Mulzet, New Directions, 2024)
The gentle giant Florian Herscht has a problem: having faithfully attended Herr Köhler’s adult education classes in physics, he is convinced that disaster is imminent. And so he embarks upon a one-sided correspondence with Chancellor Angela Merkel, to convince her of the danger of the complete destruction of all physical matter. Written in one cascading sentence with the power of atomic particles colliding, Krasznahorkai’s novel is a tour de force, a morality play, a blistering satire, a hilarious and devastating encapsulation of our helplessness at the moral and environmental dilemmas we face today.
László Krasznahorkai was born in Gyula, Hungary, in 1954. He worked for some years as an editor until 1984, when he became a freelance writer. He now lives in reclusion in the hills of Szentlászló. He has written ten novels and won numerous prizes, including the Prix Formentor, the National Book Award for Translated Literature, the International Booker Prize, and the Best Translated Book Award in Fiction.
Hari Kunzru is the author of six novels: Red Pill, White Tears, Gods Without Men, My Revolutions, Transmission, and The Impressionist. He is a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books and writes the “Easy Chair” column for Harper’s Magazine. He is an Honorary Fellow of Wadham College Oxford, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and he has been a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a Fellow of the American Academy in Berlin. He teaches in the Creative Writing Program at New York University and is the host of the podcast Into the Zone, from Pushkin Industries. He lives in Brooklyn.
Viktor Lois was born in 1950 and brought up in Tatabanya, one of the industrial strongholds of Hungarian socialism, amongst waste machines and wreckage. Lois is a child of the industrial civilization. If a new folklore can still develop, it will be individualism and internationalism; and if it is developing right now then Lois’s oeuvre is part of it. Lois’s work has been exhibited and performed frequently in major museums and galleries throughout Europe (such as Austria, Germany, the USSR, France, Netherland, and Serbia); his work is in the permanent collection of the Contemporary Art Museum in Budapest; and a building in the compound of the Mine Museum in Tatabanya is dedicated solely to him and collects more than 70 pieces of Lois’s work. In 1993 he represented Hungary as a participant in the 45th Venice Biennale.