“Guests and Ghosts” will feature readings by and a conversation among the German-language authors Michael Lentz, Tanja Paar, and Laura Vogt, and the U.S. author Jonas Hassen Khemiri. The conversation will be moderated by literary translator Alta Price, who curated this year's festival.

About “Guests and Ghosts:”

Take a seat at our haunted table to enjoy a series of readings and companionable conversation. The latest works of this year’s featured writers are shaped by specific notions of history, inheritance, belonging, and accountability. Together, they will explore how forces beyond their characters’ control inform the conscious and unconscious choices shaping each plot.

In “Guests and Ghosts,” a Festival Neue Literatur (FNL) event, acclaimed German- and English-language writers Michael Lentz, Tanja Paar, Laura Vogt, and Jonas Hassen Khemiri will read from their recent work, discuss how they deploy literary tactics to expand on inherited notions of hospitality and its opposites, and explore how history haunts their characters and plots. Guests and ghosts inhabit these tales of a narrator held in complete darkness and isolation by a mysterious jailer, of an Austrian family in Anatolia as an intercontinental railway is built and World War I tears their lives apart, of a writer bracing for her beloved uncle’s death while also grappling with her father’s absence, and of three sisters and a curious character whose lives intersect over three decades until he helps break the curse that has long loomed over the sisters’ family. Come as our guest, stay for the stories, leave inspired.

Participating speakers:

Jonas Hassen Khemiri is the author of six novels, seven plays, and a collection of essays and short stories. His work has been translated into more than thirty-five languages and his plays are performed worldwide. He received the Village Voice Obie Award for his debut play Invasion! and has been a finalist for the August Prize, Sweden’s most prestigious national book award, three times, winning it once for his novel Everything I Don’t Remember. His novel The Family Clause was a finalist for the National Book Award and won France’s Prix Médicis Étranger. The Sisters, his first book written in English, was published by FSG in 2025 and was named one of The New York Times 10 Best Books of the Year and longlisted for the National Book Award for Fiction. A former Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library, Khemiri now teaches in the MFA program at NYU.

Michael Lentz is a distinguished author and musician known for his experimental texts and sound poetry. Lentz’s prolific output spans novels, short stories, plays, radio dramas, poetry, and compositions for a variety of ensembles. His 2007 novel, Pazifik Exil (S. Fischer Verlag), explored the German-speaking exile community in Los Angeles around figures such as Bertolt Brecht, Lion Feuchtwanger, and Arnold Schoenberg. Since 2006, Lentz has served as Professor of Creative Writing at the German Literature Institute in Leipzig. He has received numerous awards, including the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize (2001) and the Walter Hasenclever Literature Prize (2012). His most recent novel, Schattenfroh. Ein Requiem (S. Fischer Verlag), was published to critical acclaim. Lentz lives in Berlin and Leipzig.

Tanja Paar writes prose, plays, and essays. She studied philosophy, German, and history in Graz, Lausanne, and Vienna, where she now lives and writes, working for theatre and various publications. Her books include The Trembling World (2020), The Unscathed (Haymon Verlag, 2018), and Am Semmering (2025). She has received numerous awards and prizes for her writing, including the Elias Canetti Scholarship and the Robert Gernhardt Prize. Her blog, Mama geht studieren [Mama’s Going to Uni], described her experience studying computer sciences. Tanja Paar’s work incorporates different disciplines and media. In 2024, she was a fellow of the Literature Forum at the Brecht House in Berlin.

Laura Vogt studied cultural studies and creative writing. Her fourth novel, Das Jahr des Kalks, was published in 2026 . Her two previous novels have been translated into English: Woman, Idle and What concerns us. Her work has been recognized with various grants and scholarships, most recently in 2025 with a scholarship from the Kunst + Kultur Foundation as part of the German Prize for Nature Writing. She lives with her family near St. Gallen, Switzerland.

Alta L. Priceruns a publishing consultancy specialized in literature and nonfiction texts on art, architecture, design, and culture. Price’s work was awarded the 2013 Gutekunst Prize, and has been featured on BBC Radio 4, the European Literature Network, Specimen, Words Without Borders, and elsewhere. Of the more than 40 books Price has translated from Italian and German, novelist Juli Zeh’s New Year was a finalist for both the 2022 PEN America Translation Prize and the Helen & Kurt Wolff Prize. Price’s most recent translations include Mithu Sanyal’s Identitti (Astra House, 2022), Zeh’s About People (World Editions, 2023), Giorgio Agamben’s What I Saw, Heard, Learned… (Seagull Books, 2023), Alberto Giacometti’s selected family letters, Time Passes too Soon (Scheidegger & Spiess, 2024), André Butzer’s Friedrich Hölderlin: The Seasons (Taschen, 2025), and Gesche Würfel’s The Absence and Presence of the Berlin Wall (Distanz, 2025). Price received a 2025 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Translation Fellowship for Maddalena Fingerle’s Lingua madre.

About Festival Neue Literatur:

Festival Neue Literatur (FNL) was established in 2009 as a collaborative project of New York’s leading German-language cultural institutions, i.e. The Austrian Cultural Forum New York; the German Consulate General New York; the Consulate General of Switzerland in New York; Columbia University School of the Arts; Deutsches Haus at NYU; and the Goethe-Institut New York. Festival Neue Literatur is the first and only festival to spotlight German-language and U.S fiction together and is proud to provide New York audiences with access to exciting new literature from Austria, Germany, Switzerland, and the U.S.

The festival is presented with additional support from the German Federal Foreign Office, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia, and the Frankfurt Book Fair.

Date & Time: October 27, 2026, 6:30 – 8:00 PM

Location: Goethe-Institut New York, 30 Irving Place, New York, NY 10003

More Information: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/guests-and-ghosts-tickets-2002097847557?aff=oddtdtcreator