Daniel Kehlmann with Joshua Cohen: The Director

Join Daniel Kehlmann, “the finest German writer of his generation” (Salman Rushdie), for a reading and conversation with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Joshua Cohen about Kehlmann’s new novel, The Director.

A chillingly provocative exploration of power, ambition and art, The Director is inspired by the life of famed German director G.W. Pabst — the man who made Greta Garbo a star, who fled to Hollywood to resist the Nazis, only to be forced to return to his homeland in Austria and create propaganda films for the German Reich with a thinly-veiled order from Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. Vowing not to submit to the dictatorship, Pabst has already taken the first step into a dark entanglement.

An ingenious work of historical imagination and a powerful reflection on the moral slippage and complicity of the artist in a brutal regime, The Director is being hailed as Kehlmann’s greatest achievement to date. At what point does beauty become barbarism? What role do artists play in a dictatorship? What is the line between creation and self-delusion? Hear one of Europe’s finest literary voices read from his bold new work as he takes on the profoundly relevant, thorny questions at the heart of art’s proximity to power.

“Daniel Kehlmann is shockingly brilliant, a writer of extraordinary range and grace.” — Lauren Groff

“[Daniel Kehlmann] is a surpassingly gifted storyteller... he is a master at depicting decent people making terrible choices, with results that are both droll and catastrophic. An atmosphere of moral queasiness permeates The Director, and the author is in perfect control of the barometric pressure.” — David Segal, The New York Times