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"Should I Stay Or Should I Go?" - Modes of Mobility in Contemporary Fiction

The annual Festival "Neue Literatur" brings some of best up-and-coming German-speaking authors such as Martin Becker, Perikles Monioudis, Olga Flor and others to New York, where they encounter well-known American writers (Joseph O’Neill, John Wray, Rivka Galchen) in a series of conversations and readings.

This year’s festival centers on the notion of mobility in today's increasingly globalized world. Many authors in Europe and the United States share an immigrant background and write in languages that are different from what they grew up with. The "immigrant experience" has become a common theme in many recent books of contemporary fiction. However, mobility or the lack thereof is not only experienced by authors who have arrived and struggled to establish themselves and their identities in a new and often hostile society, but also by writers who are longing to move away from their small-town provincial surroundings but feel that they are stuck and cannot leave. Contemporary fiction lets people move from one place to another or never at all, but it shows that ultimately, mobility is a concept of our mind.

Julya Rabinowich and Olga Flor from Austria, Martin Becker and María Cecilia Barbetta from Germany, and Perikles Monioudis and Lorenz Langenegger from Switzerland are to meet the US authors Joseph O’Neill, John Wray, and Rivka Galchen.

The Festival "Neue Literatur" is curated by Daniela Strigl and Klaus Nüchtern, the former an essayist, literary critic, and lecturer at the Vienna University’s Institute of German Studies, the latter a columnist and publicist. Both have been on the jury for the acknowledged Ingeborg Bachmann Prize.