Washington DC Event: "Strangers at Home"
Friday, October 24 at 6:30 PM
Goethe-Institut Washington DC
1377 R St. NW, 3rd Floor
Washington, DC 20009
In collaboration with the Festival Neue Literatur (FNL) in New York, the Zeitgeist Literature Festival in Washington DC – co-organized by the Goethe-Institut Washington, the Embassy of Switzerland, and the Austrian Cultural Forum Washington – presents Strangers at Home, featuring readings and a conversation with authors Alois Hotschnig (Austria), Ariane Koch (Switzerland), and Khuê Pham (Germany).
What are the obligations and limits of hospitality? When and how does familiarity tip into contempt? Can we ever fully know the people closest to us? Can we truly know our own slippery selves? Why, as the narrator in Overstaying asks, do “our minds always seek out what’s known in the unknown, instead of surrendering to the unknown?”
In this conversation, these acclaimed German-language authors will read from their recent work and discuss how they use literature to disrupt conventional notions of the familiar and the strange, of self and other, of identity, intimacy, belonging, and estrangement. Identity is pressure-tested to surprising and unexpected effect in these engaging and thought-provoking stories.
