About this Event
The Alexander Grass Humanities Institute at Johns Hopkins and Deep Vellum have recently launched an exciting new partnership focused on bringing the world’s greatest writers into dialogue across academic and public spheres.
Beginning in 2025, the AGHI will support the production, publication, and promotion of one work of literary translation annually with a sustaining grant, a translator residency, and public events on the Johns Hopkins campus. By producing and promoting major works of literary translation, the AGHI and Deep Vellum aim to deepen literary engagement in the city of Baltimore, across the nation, and throughout the world.
The first book to be supported by this partnership is the hotly anticipated Schattenfroh by Michael Lentz, translated from the German by Max Lawton. Heralded as “a literary landmark” and “a novel of titanic ambition” in a starred review from Foreword Reviews, Schattenfroh is an intricate, metaphysical, ambitious "psychogeography of the self" that both disrupts and elevates the 21st century vision of the novel.
Translator Max Lawton will be in residence at Johns Hopkins University this November, and we are delighted to invite you to this kickoff event where he will speak in conversation with Will Evans, the founder and publisher of Deep Vellum. Dr. Jeanne-Marie Jackson will moderate the conversation.
Order SCHATTENFROH here!
Max Lawton is a writer, musician, and translator. He is currently working in close collaboration with Vladimir Sorokin to publish all of his untranslated works in English. Apart from what has already been published, three more books are forthcoming from NYRB Classics and four more are forthcoming from Dalkey Archive. 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. Max is the author of two novels, The Abode and Progress, as well as a collection of short stories, The World. His translations have appeared in The New Yorker, n+1, Harper’s, The Baffler, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Joyland. He lives in Los Angeles, where, when he isn’t writing, he plays heavy metal and noise music.
Will Evans is Deep Vellum’s founder and publisher.
Jeanne-Marie Jackson received her PhD in Comparative Literature from Yale University in 2012, and joined the Johns Hopkins faculty in 2014. Her work attends to questions of comparative method, literature and philosophy, and interpretive scale, mainly but not only in the framework of African literature and intellectual history. In 2021, she was named an Andrew Carnegie Fellow.
Jackson's most recent book is The African Novel of Ideas: Philosophy and Individualism in the Age of Global Writing (Princeton 2021), which reads African fiction in tandem with African philosophy to craft a story of how the novel form has negotiated between liberal selfhood and liberal critique.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Bird in Hand Coffee & Books, 11 East 33rd Street, Baltimore, United States
USD 0.00
