21 April: Launch party, Berlin: ERB Issue Three
ACUD Galerie
21 April 2023
Veteranenstraße 2
10119 Berlin Mitte
Doors: 19.30 / Start: 20.00
A night of readings & toasts, at ACUD Gallerie in collaboration with do you read me?!. The launch will feature readings from contributors to the ERB’s first three issues: Adania Shibli on writing between Ramallah and Berlin, Svetlana Lavochkina on poetic profanity in Surzhyk, Alexander Wells on the joys of Denglish, Yu Müller on Chinese palindromes, Nienke Groskamp on psychic detectives, Sander Pleij on Mynona, Peter Frederick Matthews on catastrophic exactitude, Wiegertje Postma on the art of word vomit, Christy Wampole on the art of neurosis, George Blaustein on zero-euro bills, and more.
8 May: Is Europe a joke? On epics & counter-epics
Spui25
8 May 2023
17.00 – 18.30
Spui 25-27
1012 WX Amsterdam
Register here
This event, in concert with the Amsterdam Centre for European Studies, is half investigation and half launch party. Is Europe a joke? We will take up this many-sided provocation, at a key moment in that joke’s history. An idea of Europe that is imbued with humor, mockery, satire, burlesque — that idea is one of war’s casualties, as war washes ironies away, and a rival epic floods the frame. How to sustain the joke, to nurture the literature that enlivens it? Modern Ukrainian literature, it is said, begins with a satire of the Aeneid, written in 1798. Must every epic generate a mock-epic? We may need such terms (not to mention tragedy and farce) to narrate the geopolitical moment through which we are living.
Issue Three, book-length and fresh from the printer, will be on hand for toasts and condemnations, while a panel of discussants will offer insights into «Europe» beyond the epic.