Astrid Roemer at Brooklyn Book Festival

Sun, Oct 1 - Sun, Oct 1  2023

Astrid Roemer, the first Surinamese winner of the Dutch Literature Prize, will be at the Brooklyn Book Festival on October 1 to talk about On a Woman’s Madness, translated by Lucy Scott.

Mazes of the Mind: On Mapping Extreme States

International luminaries Astrid Roemer, Carlos Fonseca, and Norman Erikson Pasaribu come together to discuss the precarity of dislocation, memory, and desire. In Astrid Roemer’s queer classic On a Woman’s Madness (tr. Lucy Scott), we meet a woman fleeing her hometown of Suriname, and in Carlos Fonseca’s luminous Austral (tr. Megan McDowell), a professor on a journey to a forgotten city in Guatemala (and beyond) to uncover the mysteries of a friend’s final novel. Norman Erikson Pasaribu’s Happy Stories, Mostly (tr. Tiffany Tsao) constructs speculative and surreal futures out of loss, stories that gleam like magic mirrors. Through dreamscape, striking postcolonial commentary, and dark humor, each book offers a fragment of hope.

The festival program will be followed by a half-hour book signing.