"Berlin Atomized is the world bridged, coupled, and made fast—by the latest lost generation and by Julia Kornberg's border-and-genre-crossing talent, as restless as a flame." —Joshua Cohen, author of the Pulitzer Prize and National Jewish Book Award winning The Netanyahus

A kinetic, globetrotting novel following three siblings—Jewish and downwardly mobile—from 2001 to 2034, as they come of age against the major crises of the 21st century.

Berlin Atomized begins in Buenos Aires of the early 2000s with the self-baptisms of Nina Goldstein. She bathes too frequently, washing with fervor and repeating: “I am not asleep.” She grows up partying and taking undeserved siestas, while her eldest brother Jeremías is drawn into the city’s powder keg music scene, and the middle sibling, Mateo, learns of his terminal illness and prepares to join the IDF. Though Argentina faces the worst economic crisis in its history, the Goldsteins are being reared in a newly developed gated community that displaces working class families. Each sibling rehearses their escape from the capitalist Eden of their birth, unaware that the gated community will soon be underwater, and their family scattered all over the earth.

The second half of the novel takes place between 2018 and 2035, invoking and imagining possible futures for this existence in migration. Jeremías lives in Paris until an undeclared war destroys the city, and Nina, after tracing Mateo’s last steps to his death in Tel Aviv, ends up in Berlin, where the European Union is found in the shambles of its own history. From Punta del Este to Paris, Berlin to Jerusalem, Brussels to Tokyo, the novel progresses into a dire near future of constant flight and fire as the siblings search for one another.

Defiant and dexterous, percussive and percolating with violent light, Berlin Atomized is Julia Kornberg’s napalm-ic debut—a tale about the end of the world, as told by the clear-eyed youth to which that world had been promised.

"Remarkable, tender, funny...[Berlin Atomized is] a novel in fragments floating in the great events of immanent youth.” —Pola Oloixarac, author of Mona

“A punk song of lost innocence and the madness of history, this brilliant debut brings a new name, and a potent style, to the table: Julia Kornberg.” —Carlos Fonseca, author of Austral

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Julia Kornberg was born in Buenos Aires in 1996 and lives in New York City. Her work has been published in the New York Review of Books, the Jewish Review of Books, the Drift, Bookforum, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, the Baffler, and other publications. She is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University.

 

 
 

Jack Rockwell is a writer and translator from Brooklyn, New York. He is currently enrolled in the MFA program in Literary Translation at the University of Iowa. His work has appeared in, or is forthcoming in, the Chicago Review of Books, Words Without Borders, Latin American Literature Today, and other publications.

 

 

 

Christian Lorentzen's writing has appeared in the London Review of Books, Harper’s Magazine, Bookforum, Artforum, n+1, the Times Literary Supplement, the New Republic, the Paris Review, the Baffler, the New York Times, Slate, the Literary Review, and the New Leader. From 2015 to 2018, he was the book critic for New York Magazine.

 

 

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