Wednesday, May 9, 2018 – Saturday, May 12, 2018

In Conversation with Georgi Gospodinov and Martin Pulcher
Wednesday, May 9, 2018
Book Culture
536 W 112th Street
New York, NY
7:00pm

In Conversation with Izabela Barry at Brooklyn Central Library
Friday, May 11, 2018
10 Grand Army Plaza
Brooklyn, NY
2:00 – 4:00pm

Reading and in Discussion with Antonia Lloyd-Jones at European Literature Night
Saturday, May 12, 2018
Bohemian National Hall
321 East 73rd Street
New York, NY
5:00 – 10:00pm

In the tradition of Ryszard Kapuscinski, award-winning Polish journalist Witold Szablowski uncovers remarkable stories of people throughout Eastern Europe and in Cuba who, like Bulgaria’s dancing bears, are now free but who seem nostalgic for the time when they were not. His on-the-ground reporting–of smuggling a car into Ukraine, hitchhiking through Kosovo as it declares independence, arguing with Stalin-adoring tour guides at the Stalin Museum, sleeping in London’s Victoria Station alongside a homeless woman from Poland, and giving taxi rides to Cubans fearing for the life of Fidel Castro–provides a fascinating portrait of social and economic upheaval and a lesson in the challenges of freedom and the seductions of authoritarian rule.

Dancing Bears is Szablowski’s timely American debut. He will be coming to New York for a series of events around this year’s European Literature Night, an annual event celebrating works of fiction and nonfiction from across the continent.

On May 9, Szablowski will speak at Book Culture on 112th. Joining him will be one of Bulgaria’s most beloved contemporary authors, Georgi Gospodinov. His novel The Physics of Sorrow (Open Letter Books, 2015) won the Jan Michalski Prize and was praised in The New Yorker. He is currently a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library. Moderating will be the author and literary historian Martin Puchner, currently the Byron and Anita Wien Chair of Drama and of English and Comparative Literature at Harvard University.

For more information, please visit the Book Culture website.

On May 11, Szablowski will speak discuss his book with librarian and Polish literature expert Izabela Barry at the Central Branch of Brooklyn Public Library, on Grand Army Plaza next to Prospect Park.

On May 12, Szablowski and his translator Antonia Lloyd-Jones will be featured guests of European Literature Night. ELN is an annual celebration of literature from across the continent, hosted at Bohemian National Hall. Attendees will have the opportunity to hear readings and discussions of books from 15 countries, as well as musical performances and an exhibition of visual art inspired by these works.

In collaboration with the New School’s Mannes School of Music and Parsons School of Design, each reading will feature a musical piece inspired by the featured book, as well as one or more work of visual art, on display in the gallery on BNH’s 2nd floor.

The evening will kick off at 5pm with a screening of two short Czech films: Adelheid by Frantisek Vlácil and Icarus XB by Jindrich Polák. This will be followed by the opening of the gallery exhibition at 6:30pm. Readings will run from 7-9pm, with books on-sale in the BNH’s main ballroom. Finally at 9, Czech artist, author and filmmaker Peter Sís will discuss his book Train To Freedom, accompanied by musical performances by American composer Lowell Liberman and by Logan Vrankovic.

Szablowski and Lloyd-Jones will read from 8-9pm in Czech Center New York Gallery on the 2nd floor. Their reading will feature a performance of Jorge Tabares Garcia’s String Trio, as well as art by Clair Gunther and Chase Bindner.

For full details about European Literature Night, please visit the Czech Center’s website.

Witold Szablowski is an award-winning Polish journalist. At age twenty-five he became the youngest reporter at the Polish daily newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza’s weekly supplement, Duzy Format, where he covered international stories in countries including Cuba, South Africa, and Iceland. His features on the problem of illegal immigrants flocking to the EU won the European Parliament Journalism Prize; his reportage on the 1943 massacre of Poles in Ukraine won the Polish Press Agency’s Ryszard Kapuscinski Award; and his book about Turkey, The Assassin from Apricot City, won the Beata Pawlak Award and an English PEN award, and was nominated for the Nike Award, Poland’s most prestigious literary prize. Szablowski lives in Warsaw.

Antonia Lloyd-Jones has translated works by many of Poland’s leading novelists and authors of reportage, as well as crime fiction, poetry screenplays and children’s books. She is a two-time winner of the Found in Translation Award and from 2015-2017 she was the co-chair of the UK’s Translators Association.

Georgi Gospodinov (1968) is poet and writer, one of the most translated and awarded Bulgarian authors. His debut novel, Natural Novel (1999), was published in more than 20 languages. His next novel, The Physics of Sorrow (Open Letter Books, 2015), won the international Jan Michalski Prize 2016 and was finalist for the American PEN Translation Prize, the Best Translated Book Award (BTBA), Premio Strega Europeo, etc. The novel has been widely praised in Europe and the US. According to The New Yorker, “Georgi’s real quest in The Physics of Sorrow is to find a way to live with sadness, to allow it to be a source of empathy and salutary hesitation…” Gospodinov has written two plays, D.J. (2004) and The Apocalypse Comes at 6 PM (2010, US premiere at the Single Carrot Theater, Baltimore, 2015). He has also written an opera libretto for Space Opera (2015, Poznan). Blind Vaysha, a short animation (dir. Theo Ushev) based on Gospodinov’s short story from And Other Stories, made it to the Academy Award nominees in 2017. Gospodinov is currently a Cullman fellow at the New York Public Library.

Martin Puchner is the Byron and Anita Wien Chair of Drama and of English and Comparative Literature at Harvard University. His prize-winning books cover subjects from philosophy to the arts, and his bestselling six-volume Norton Anthology of World Literature and his HarvardX MOOC (massive open online course) have brought four thousand years of literature to students across the globe. His most recent book, The Written World: The Power of Stories of Shape People, History, Civilization (Random House), tells the story of literature from the invention of writing to the Internet.