Winner of the most prestigious German prize for debut fiction, Swiss playwright and visual artist Ariane Koch’s Overstaying is an absurdist tour de force.

“Overstaying amazed me.” —Jonathan Lethem

“I don't see my writing as chronological or classically narrative, but as spatial—a kind of architecture. I keep adding rooms, and readers can take different paths through the rooms,” writes Ariane Koch of Overstaying, her anarchically comic debut. Koch’s narrator is an impudent young woman, a contemporary Bartleby living alone in her parents’ old house in the small hometown she hates but can’t bring herself to leave.

When a visitor turns up, promisingly new, she takes him in, and instantly her life revolves around him. Yet it is hard to tell what, exactly, this visitor is. A mooch, a lover, an absence, a presence—possibly a pet? Mostly, he is a set of contradictions, an occasion for Koch’s wild imagination to take readers in brilliant and unexpected directions.

“Layered, experimental, and fragmented, this novel embraces the strangeness both in and around us.” —Kirkus, starred review

“The tale is uncanny, bizarre and outlandish, delivered with such charm and wry humour that this brilliant slim book is utterly captivating.” —The Berliner

Please note the author will not be in attendance. Ariane Koch was born in Basel and studied fine arts and interdisciplinarity. She writes—often in collaboration—theater and performance texts, radio plays, and prose. Her texts have won numerous awards and have been performed in places like Basel, Berlin, Cairo, Istanbul, and Moscow. Overstaying is her debut novel. 

---

Damion Searls has translated sixty books of literature and philosophy from German, Norwegian, French, and Dutch, including the novels of Jon Fosse, winner of the 2023 Nobel Prize for Literature. His own writing includes fiction, poetry, a biography of the creator of the Rorschach test, and The Philosophy of Translation.

 

 

 

Emma Ramadan is an educator and literary translator from French. She was awarded the PEN Translation Prize for Abdellah Taïa’s A Country for Dying, and has also received the Albertine Prize, two NEA Fellowships, and a Fulbright. Her other translations include Anne Garréta's Sphinx, Barbara Molinard's Panics, and Marguerite Duras's Me & Other Writing.

 

 

RSVP Below