Heike Geissler in Conversation with Chris Kraus and Kevin Vennemann
Event Information
Event description
Description
Heike Geissler will discuss her non-fiction-novel Seasonal Associate with Chris Kraus and Kevin Venneman.
How the brutalities of working life are transformed into exhaustion, shame, and self-doubt: a writer's account of her experience working in an Amazon fulfillment center. No longer able to live on the proceeds of her freelance writing and translating income, German novelist Heike Geissler takes a seasonal job at Amazon Order Fulfillment in Leipzig. But the job, intended as a stopgap measure, quickly becomes a descent into humiliation, and Geissler soon begins to internalize the dynamics and nature of the post-capitalist labor market and precarious work. Driven to work at Amazon by financial necessity rather than journalistic ambition, Heike Geissler has nonetheless written the first and only literary account of corporate flex-time employment that offers “freedom” to workers who have become an expendable resource. Shifting between the first and the second person, Seasonal Associate is a nuanced expose of the psychic damage that is an essential working condition with mega-corporations. Geissler has written a twenty-first-century account of how the brutalities of working life are transformed into exhaustion, shame, and self-doubt.
Heike Geissler is a fiction writer from Leipzig, Germany. She teaches creative writing in Halle/Saale and Leipzig. Rosa, her first novel, was awarded with the Alfred Döblin Prize for debut fiction in 2001. She subsequently published a novella, Nichts was tragisch wäre, in 2009 and a children’s book, Emma & Pferd Beere, in 2010. Her critically acclaimed non-fiction-novel Seasonal Associate (Saisonarbeit) earned her a fellowship by the German Academy Rome Villa Massimo in 2017. The English translation of Seasonal Associate was published by Semiotext(e) in 2018.
Chris Kraus is the author of four novels and three books of art and cultural criticism, as well as a biography of Kathy Acker. Alongside Hedi El Kholti and Sylvere Lotringer, she’s a co-editor of Semiotext(e).
Kevin Vennemann is a writer as well as a translator from English to German (Chris Kraus, Mark Greif, Franco Berardi and others), and teaches at Scripps College in Claremont, CA.
