The Austrian Cultural Forum New York and Deutsches Haus at NYU present “Guess Who Came to Dinner: Fictions by Teresa Präauer and Jessi Jeżewska Stevens” and a reading by the authors from their works “Kochen im falschen Jahrhundert” (2023) and “Ghost Pains” (2024), followed by a moderated conversation with the translator and author Tess Lewis. Both authors are keen observers of social niceties and not-so-niceties. By delving into the said and the unsaid, the complexities of taste and mores, they paint vivid, psychologically precise portraits of relationships and dinner parties teetering on the brink of disaster. De gustibus, we’re told, non est disputandem, but Präauer’s and Stevens’ witty, kaleidoscopic writing shows that taste is a very contentious topic, indeed.

About the Books:

“Kochen im falschen Jahrhundert” (Wallstein Verlag, 2023)

Teresa Präauer’s novel portrays a dinner party, filled with recipes for a successful life but ultimately an unsuccessful evening, which begins over and over again. Smart, witty, and light, the gathering is also punctuated by the guests’ passive or quite active aggression. The dinner conversations sway between the macro and the micro: from social media food-porn to cooking, shopping, and lifestyle as social practices. The evening grows stranger, more tragic, more erotic – ‘current’ concepts are debate while the party’s not quite gifted hostess feels transposed to the wrong century. In small, parenthetical anecdotes, Präauer tells a history of accessories, meals, and culinary delights.

“Ghost Pains” (And Other Stories, 2024)

Jessi Jezewska Stevens’ women throw disastrous parties in the post-party era, flirt through landscapes of terror and war, and find themselves unrecognizable after waking up with old flames in new cities. They navigate the labyrinths of history, love, and ethics in a fractured American present, seeing first-hand how history influences the ways in which we care for – or neglect – one another.

With each story exemplifying Stevens’s ability to examine the big questions through the microscope of a shambolic human perspective, Ghost Pains is a triumphant statement of purpose from one of our greatest young writer-thinkers.

“Guess Who Came to Dinner: Fictions by Teresa Präauer and Jessi Jeżewska Stevens” is made possible through the generous support by Austria's Federal Ministry of the Arts, Culture, the Civil Service, and Sport (BMKOES).

Date and Time: Thursday, March 28^th 2024 from 6:00 PM to 7:30 PM

Location: Deutsches Haus at NYU, 42 Washington Mews, New York, NY 10003

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