Born in India and living in New York, Rajesh Parameswaran’s short story collection »I Am an Executioner – Love Stories« dances across an absurdist cast of characters ranging from a Bengal tiger who wakes up one morning realising he is ravenously in love, to a fake doctor who is visited by his cancer-riddled wife.
The book may be subtitled »Love Stories«, but as the Guardian says: »Rajesh Parameswaran’s intriguingly off-kilter world is far from slushily romantic. The meaning of love for Parameswaran, an Indian-born American, is inventively twisted and often found in death.
Born in Singapore and living in New York, Amanda Lee Koe’s debut novel, »Delayed Rays of A Star«, begins from a real-life photograph of Anna May Wong, Marlene Dietrich, and Leni Riefenstahl, then splinters out into a kaleidoscope of the various lives – both fictional and historical – that they have touched, often linked by the complex interactions between love and power. As NPR says: »Blending questions about pop culture, war, and art, Delayed Rays of a Star is that rare book that is neither high- nor low-brow, refusing such facile dichotomies and playing, instead, in the messiness of the grey areas«
The authors, both currently residing in Berlin as 2023 Literature Fellows of the DAAD Artist-in-Residence program, will read from their texts and, in a conversation, explore the specifics of writing about the power of love and the love of power, two urgent human desires that inevitably, and sometimes calamitously, intertwine.
Hosted by Miriam Zeh.
The event is in English.
