“Misophonia”: An Evening with Dana Vowinckel

Deutsches Haus at NYU presents a reading by Dana Vowinckel from her acclaimed debut novel , (Harpervia, 2025), followed by a conversation among her, the book’s translator, Adrian Nathan West, and the editor of Misophonia in Germany (Gewässer im Ziplock, Suhrkamp Verlag), Martina Wunderer.

About Misophonia:

It’s another scorching summer in Chicago, and fifteen-year-old Margarita is spending her vacation as usual, under the not-so-watchful eyes of her aging maternal grandparents. All told, the plucky teen would much rather be at home in Germany, exploring Berlin with her best friend, Anna, or with Avi, her doting Israeli father, a cantor at their local synagogue with whom she has shared a special bond ever since her mother, Marsha, abandoned the family. Instead, she’s stuck halfway around the world, homesick and tortured by the sound of her grandparents’ chewing. But when arrangements are made behind her back for her to meet Marsha in Israel before returning to Germany, Margarita is blindsided. She wants no part of this overdue reconciliation with a mother she hardly knows/ When her mother fails to show, however, things go awry. Meanwhile, in Germany, Avi tries to fill the hole left by Margarita’s absence with a trip of his own, embarking on a personal journey, both hope-inducing and despairing.Expertly straddling the two narratives of daughter and father, Misophonia is a graceful exploration of imperfect family relationships and larger cultural displacement.

About the participants:

Dana Vowinckel (born in Berlin) studied Linguistics and Literature in Berlin, Toulouse and Cambridge. Her debut novel won, among others, the Mara Cassens Prize and the literature prize of the Association of Arts and Culture of the German Economy, and was shortlisted for the prestigious Leipzig Book Fair Prize. She occasionally writes for Zeit Online and lives in Berlin.

is the author of the novel My Father’s Diet as well as the translator of dozens of books from Spanish, German, and Catalan. His most recent translations are Dana Vowinckel’s Misophonia and Hermann Burger’s Diabelli. His criticism and essays have appeared in The Baffler, The New York Review of Books, Liberties, and many other journals and magazines.

Martina Wunderer (born in Schlanders, Italy) studied Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies in Vienna and Berlin and works as an editor for German literature at Suhrkamp Verlag in Berlin.

Attendance:

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