Difficult Literature: Max Lawton with Joshua Cohen and Christian Lorentzen

Translator and writer Max Lawton is joined by the novelist Joshua Cohen and critic Christian Lorentzen for a conversation about “difficult” literature, celebrating the English publication of The Sugar Kremlin by Vladimir Sorokin, translated by Lawton. They’ll discuss Sorokin as well as Schattenfroh by Michael Lentz, big books, weird books, and the art of translating them.

PLEASE NOTE: RSVPs are encouraged but not required. Seating is limited and will be first come, first served. Doors open at 5:30 pm.

Can't attend? Order your signed copy (please specify that you would like it signed in the comments box at checkout).

Presenting a wide variety of genres and tones, The Sugar Kremlin lays out a frightening vision of speculative mercilessness and carnivalesque political horror.

The Sugar Kremlin is the follow-up to Vladimir Sorokin’s Day of the Oprichnik, taking place in the same New Medieval universe over the course of fifteen chapters that all return to the object of the title: replicas of the Moscow Kremlin made of sugar. Thousands of these creations are given away to children during the holidays, then make their way through each stratum of Russian society. We follow the trajectories of these candied gifts from the hands of harried paupers to secret political dissidents, from torture-obsessed civil servants to sex workers in a nearby bordello...

As Sorokin shifts from story to story and style to style, he draws the reader through grotesquely Russian scenes, creating an aberrantly metaphysical encyclopedia of the New Medieval "Russian soul." The candy's sweetness is deceptive—underneath it, you may detect notes of blood.

Max Lawton is a translator, novelist, and musician. He has translated many books by Vladimir Sorokin, including Blue Lard (NYRB Classics), Their Four Hearts, Dispatches from the District Committee, and The Sugar Kremlin (Dalkey Archive Press). Max is also currently working on translations of works by Michael Lentz, Antonio Moresco, Stefano D’Arrigo, Alberto Laiseca, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Eduard Limonov, and Louis-Ferdinand Céline. He is the author of two novels, The Abode and Progress, as well as a collection of short stories, The World. He lives in Los Angeles.

Joshua Cohen was born in 1980 in Atlantic City. Called “a major American writer” by the New York Times, and “an extraordinary prose stylist, surely one of the most prodigious at work in American fiction today” by the New Yorker, Cohen has published novels (The Netanyahus, Moving Kings, Book of Numbers, Witz), a collection of stories (Four New Messages), and a collection of essays (Attention). He was named one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists, and his awards include the Matanel Prize, the National Jewish Book Award, and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Christian Lorentzen's writing has appeared in the London Review of Books, Harper’s Magazine, Bookforum, Artforum, n+1, the Times Literary Supplement, the New Republic, the Paris Review, the Baffler, the New York Times, Slate, the Literary Review, and the New Leader. From 2015 to 2018, he was the book critic for New York Magazine.