Intimate Thresholds: Identity and Longing
Monday, October 26 at 6:00 PM
Deutsches Haus at NYU
42 Washington Mews, New York, NY 10003
On Monday, October 26, at 6 PM, the Festival Neue Literatur partners present "Intimate Thresholds: Identity and Longing," a conversation between the authors Laura Vogt and Nicole Krauss about their novels Woman, Idle (2025, Heloise Press, in a translation from German by Caroline Waight) and To Be a Man. The conversation will be moderated by the author and literary translator Tess Lewis.
How does desire shape our worlds? What influence does the past have on our longings? Why are loss and grief such creatively generative forces? In this exchange of ideas, writers Laura Vogt and Nicole Krauss read from their work and discuss the ways we struggle to achieve a sense of ourselves despite and because of the social, historical, and emotional forces to which we are subject.
Please RSVP for in-person attendance here.
About Woman, Idle:
Woman, Idle explores non-monogamous relationships and shifting identities through the voices of three women, brought together in the quiet tension of the Swiss mountains. Told in alternating voices, the book explores two main questions: What kind of women have I become? What kind of women do I want to be?
In the Swiss mountains, Romi and Szibilla arrive at Nora’s childhood home to find their longtime friend has retreated into silence. With Nora refusing to speak and her mother keeping them at arm’s length, Romi and Szibilla are forced into an uneasy time together over the next five days. Their mutual acquaintance will bring out their own insecurities as friends, lovers, and mothers, unexpectedly confronted with themselves and their own choices. This is a novel that masterfully blends daily-life reflections with suspense. Insightful yet easy to read, readers will be captivated by the mystery surrounding the silent woman.
About To Be a Man:
In one of her most accomplished books yet, Nicole Krauss plunges fearlessly into the struggle to understand what it is to be a man and what it is to be a woman, and the arising tensions that have existed in all relationships from the very beginning of time. Set in our contemporary moment, and moving across the globe from Switzerland, Japan, and New York City to Tel Aviv, Los Angeles, and South America, the stories in To Be a Man feature male characters as fathers, lovers, friends, children, seducers, and even a lost husband who may never have been a husband at all.
The way these stories mirror one other and resonate is beautiful, with a balance so finely tuned that the book almost feels like a novel. Echoes ring through stages of life: aging parents and new-born babies; young women’s coming of age and the newfound, somewhat bewildering sexual power that accompanies it; generational gaps and unexpected deliveries of strange new leases on life; mystery and wonder at a life lived or a future waiting to unfold. To Be a Man illuminates with a fierce, unwavering light the forces driving human existence: sex, power, violence, passion, self-discovery, growing older. Profound, poignant, and brilliant, Krauss’s stories are at once startling and deeply moving, but always revealing of all-too-human weakness and strength.
Participating speakers:
Nicole Krausshas been called “one of American’s most important novelists and an international literary sensation” by the New York Times, “a contemporary master,” by Esquire, and “one of American’s greatest writers” by the Financial Times. She is the author of Man Walks Into a Room, Forest Dark, Great House and The History of Love and the short story collection To Be a Man. She was the inaugural writer-in-residence at the Zuckerman Mind, Brain and Behavior Institute at Columbia University, and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy in Berlin, and the Cullman Center at the New York Public Library. Her new novel, Vita, will be published in September 2027.
Laura Vogt was born in Teufen, Switzerland, in 1989. She studied Creative Writing at the Swiss Literature Institute in Biel and Cultural Studies at the University of Lucerne. She is the author of four novels: So einfach war es also zu gehen (2016), Was uns betrifft (2020), Die liegende Frau (2023), and Das Jahr des Kalks (2026). Was uns betrifft and Die liegende Frau have been published in English as What Concerns Us (2022) and Woman, Idle (2025) Vogt also writes poetry, plays, short fiction, and journalism. Filter, a collection of prose poems, was published in 2015. Her writing has been supported by numerous grants and scholarships, including a 2025 scholarship to participate in the Nature Writing Workshop associated with the German Prize for Nature Writing. She lives with her family near St. Gallen, in eastern Switzerland.
Tess Lewis’s translations include works by Peter Handke, Walter Benjamin, Montaigne, Ingeborg Bachmann, Lutz Seiler, and Anne Weber. Her essays and reviews have appeared in journals and newspapers including The American Scholar, The Wall Street Journal, Partisan Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Miami Herald, Bookforum, World Literature Today, and The Hudson Review. Tess Lewis was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2016. She was a 2021-22 Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin and a 2023-24 Scholar of Note at the American Library in Paris. In 2023, She received the Friedrich Ulfers Prize, which recognizes those who champion the advancement of German-language literature in the U.S.
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: the Austrian Cultural Forum New York, the Consulate General of the Federal Republic of Germany in New York, the Consulate General of Switzerland in New York, Deutsches Haus at NYU, and Goethe-Institut New York. Additional support for Festival Neue Literatur is provided by the German Federal Foreign Office, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia, and the Frankfurt Book Fair. All FNL events are free of charge, though RSVP is required. The 2026 festival will take place on October 26 and 27 in New York City and on October 29 in Washington, D.C.
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.
