Sub-Rosa is a reading group that meets once a month to discuss feminist and obscure literature.
Our selection for this month is Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck.
We will meet Saturday, January 25 at 6:30 p.m. at the store. A reminder will be sent out the day before the meeting.
If you are interested in attending please send us your email to bookbeatorders@gmail.com.
Books are in stock and discounted 15%.
WINNER OF THE 2024 INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE
LONGLISTED FOR THE 2023 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR TRANSLATED LITERATURE
LONGLISTED FOR THE 2024 NATIONAL TRANSLATION AWARD IN PROSE
An epic storyteller with the most powerful voice in contemporary German literature, Jenny Erpenbeck has created an unforgettably compelling masterpiece with Kairos. The story of a romance begun in East Berlin at the end of the 1980s: the passionate yet difficult long-running affair of Katharina and Hans hits the rocks as a whole world—the socialist GDR—melts away. As the Times Literary Supplement writes: “The weight of history, the particular experiences of East and West, and the ways in which cultural and subjective memory shape individual identity has always been present in Erpenbeck’s work. She knows that no one is all bad, no state all rotten, and she masterfully captures the existential bewilderment of his period between states and ideologies.”
In the opinion of her superbly gifted translator Michael Hofmann, Kairos is the great post-Unification novel.
“The most prominent and serious German novelist of her generation.”—James Wood, The New Yorker
“Erpenbeck is among the most sophisticated and powerful novelists we have. Clinging to the undercarriage of her sentences, like fugitives, are intimations of Germany’s politics, history and cultural memory. It’s no surprise that she is already bruited as a future Nobelist…I don’t generally read the books I review twice, but this one I did.”—Dwight Garner, The New York Times
Jenny Erpenbeck was born in East Berlin in 1967, and is an opera director, playwright and award-winning novelist. She first trained as a bookbinder, then worked as a theatre props manager before studying musical theatre direction and enjoying a successful career as an opera director from the late 1990s. She published her debut novella, Geschichte vom alten Kind, in 1999. Susan Bernofsky’s English translation, The Old Child, was published in 2005. Erpenbeck’s other translated works include The Book of Words (2008), Visitation (2010) and The End of Days (2014, winner of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize), and Go, Went, Gone (2017, which was longlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2018). as well as Not a Novel: Collected Writings and Reflections (2020). Her work has been translated into over 30 languages, and it has been said that she is better known overseas than in her native Germany. In 2019 her novel Visitation was named one of the 100 best books of the 21st century by the Guardian. In the United States, her novel Kairos, translated by Michael Hofmann, was longlisted for 2023’s National Book Award for Translated Literature. In May 2024, Kairos won the International Booker Prize.