Join us at the Czech Center New York for an engaging discussion featuring three distinguished figures in the literary world: author Magdaléna Platzová, scholar Veronika Tuckerová, and translator Alex Zucker. The talk will delve into Platzová's latest novel, Life After Kafka, and explore a range of related literary topics.
Register for free here.
Franz Kafka scholars know Felice Bauer, his onetime fiancée, through his Letters to Felice, as little more than a woman with a raucous laugh and a taste for bourgeois comforts. Life After Kafka is her story.
The novel begins in 1935 as Felice flees with her children from Hitler’s Berlin, following her family and members of Kafka’s entourage—including Grete Bloch, Max Brod, and Salman Schocken—as they try to escape the horrors of the Holocaust. Years later, a man claiming to be Kafka’s son approaches Felice’s son in Manhattan and the drama surrounding Kafka’s letters to Felice begins.
While taking the measure of literary fame’s long shadow, Life After Kafka depicts the magic and poison of memories, and what we cling to when all else is lost. Most of all, it illuminates the bravery required to move forward through the shattered remains of one world to rebuild life in a new one.
Magdaléna Platzová is the author of nine books, including three novels published in English: Aaron’s Leap, a Lidové Noviny Book of the Year Award finalist, The Attempt, longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award and a Czech Book Award finalist, and Life After Kafka, a Magnesia Litera award finalist. Her fiction has also appeared in A Public Space and Words Without Borders. Platzová grew up in the Czech Republic; studied in Washington, DC, and England; received her MA in Philosophy at Charles University in Prague; and has taught at New York University’s Gallatin School. She is now based in Lyon, France.
Veronika Tuckerová is a literary scholar and translator. Born in Prague, she graduated from Columbia University in New York and has been at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts since 2013. Her research interests include the Czech reception of Franz Kafka, dissent, translation, and visual art. She has published in the Journal of World Literature, New German Critique, brücken and other journals. She is a long-time contributor to the Prague based journal Revolver Revue. Her book Reading Kafka in Prague is set for publication by Bloomsbury Academic in New York in 2025.
Alex Zucker is the award-winning translator of several books by Czech authors. Among other honors, he has received the American Literary Translators Association’s National Translation Award, two English PEN Translates awards, and a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship. His recent translation of Bianca Bellová’s The Lake was the winner of the EBRD Literature Prize, and his translation of Magdaléna Platzová’s The Attempt was longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award. Zucker is a former cochair of the PEN America Translation Committee and has collaborated with the Authors Guild on many projects, including its first model contract for literary translation. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
The event will offer a rich conversation on the legacy of Kafka and the broader implications of literary memory and identity. Don't miss this opportunity to engage with these eminent voices in contemporary literature!
