VIRTUAL - Philip Boehm translator of THE PASSENGER by Ulrich Alexander Bochwitz

Start:

Tuesday, April 20, 2021 - 7:00pm

Location:

Virtual

This event will be hosted on Zoom Webinar. Click here to register.

Philip Boehm will be in conversation with Mimi Swartz.

Brazos Bookstore and Goethe Pop-Up Houston presents Philip Boehm in conversation with Mimi Swartz for his translation of The Passenger by Ulrich Alexander Bochwitz. There will be a brief reading by Philip Boehm followed by a conversation with Mimi Swartz.

“The Passenger” is a jewel of a rediscovery: At once a deeply satisfying novel and a vital historical document—likely the first literary account, as Mr. Graf writes in his afterword, of Kristallnacht and its repercussions. Through the eyes of Otto Silbermann, we are thrust into the moment when politically legislated persecution tips into full-scale existential assault, our protagonist’s bewilderment morphing into terror and defiance as he tries to convince himself that the situation will surely get better: “Sooner or later they’ll leave us alone again. . . . Things aren’t all that bad, when it comes down to it. Despite everything, I’m still alive.” - Mr. Lichtig is the fiction and politics editor of the Times Literary Supplement

Philip Boehm has translated dozens of novels and plays by German and Polish writers, including Herta Müller, Franz Kafka and Hanna Krall. For this work he has received fellowships from the NEA and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, as well as numerous awards, most recently the Wolff Translator's Prize from the Goethe Institute. He is also a theater director and playwright.

Mimi Swartz, is an executive editor of Texas Monthly magazine and a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times Op-Ed page . She is also the author of two books, Power Failure, the Inside Story of the Collapse of Enron and Ticker, The Quest to Create An Artificial Heart.Overall, Swartz has worked at Texas Monthly for nearly thirty years and is a two time winner of and four time finalist for the National Magazine Award for stories published there. She has also been a staff writer at The New Yorker and the now defunct Talk Magazine; her work has also appeared in Vanity Fair, Esquire, Slate, National Geographic and the New York Times Sunday magazine. Her pieces have been collected in Best American Political Writing, 2006, and Best American Sportswriting, 2007. Swartz grew up in San Antonio, Texas, and now lives in Houston, with her husband John Wilburn. They have a son, Sam.