Deutsches Haus at NYU, Light Industry, and the New York Institute for the Humanities present a conversation between authors Ian Penman and Gary Indiana about Penman’s new book, Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors (Semiotext(e), May 2023), a kaleidoscopic study of acclaimed filmmaker, writer, and actor Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

About Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors:

Melodrama, biography, cold war thriller, drug memoir, essay in fragments, and mystery, Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors is cult critic Ian Penman's long-awaited first full-length book: a kaleidoscopic study of Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Written over a short period “in the spirit” of RWF, who would often get films made in a matter of weeks or months, Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors presents the filmmaker as Penman's equivalent of what Baudelaire was to Benjamin: an urban poet in the turbulent, seeds-sown, messy era just before everything changed.

About the speakers:

Ian Penman is a British writer, music journalist, and critic. He began his career at the NME in 1977, later contributing to various publications including The Face, Arena, Tatler, Uncut, Sight & Sound, The Wire, The Guardian, the London Review of Books, and City Journal. He is the author of Vital Signs: Music, Movies, and Other Manias and It Gets Me Home, This Curving Track.

Gary Indiana is a novelist and critic who has chronicled the despair and hysteria of America in the late twentieth century and on. From Horse Crazy (1989), a tale of feverish love set against the backdrop of downtown New York amid the AIDS epidemic, to Do Everything in the Dark (2003), “a desolate frieze of New York’s aging bohemians” (n+1), Indiana’s novels mix horror and bathos, grim social commentary with passages of tenderest, frailest desire.

Date and Time: 6:00 - 7:30pm on Wednesday, May 10th 2023

Location: In-person at Deutsches Haus at NYU, 42 Washington Mews, New York, NY 10003

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