Join celebrated Swiss author Dorothee Elmiger and American writer Kate Zambreno for a conversation about Megan Ewing’s new English translation of Elmiger’s Out of the Sugar Factory. In an era of greed and lust, power and excess, Out of the Sugar Factory plumbs the impact of the sugar manufacturing industry through a kaleidoscope of memories, dreams, literary references, narrative threads, and historical fragments. From the Haitian Revolution and Chantal Akerman, to Karl Marx, James Joyce and D.H. Lawrence, Elmiger compiles a journal of reflections on global systems of capital through the medium of her personal patterns of experience. At a time when this critical historical lens is under attack across the U.S., we can look to Elmiger’s work as inspiration to keep revising old stories we have told until now.
This event will take place in person at The Center for Fiction in Brooklyn (1:30pm ET) with audiences at the American Library in Paris (in Paris; 19h30 CEST) and the Center for the Art of Translation in San Francisco (10:30am PT). Join us at our San Francisco office for coffee and pastries to enjoy this live streaming experience. Register for the livestream.(opens in a new tab)
About The International Library
Conversations across time, place, and language
Join the American Library in Paris, the Center for the Art of Translation, and The Center for Fiction for conversations across time, place, culture, and literary tradition, with live audiences in San Francisco, Brooklyn, and Paris.
At the intersection of theory and practice, past and present, as well as story and history, The International Library celebrates the live diffusion of in-person conversations in the hope of conjuring new possibilities and connecting new audiences across land and sea for a collective, intercultural experience.
Over the course of these conversations, we hope to broach the following questions about writing and translation: Who gets to translate? To be translated? How to translate? And for whom to translate? More broadly, the series will guide readers to think critically about how stories are told, investigating the points of view, the timing of the translations, and the intended or assumed audiences as well as inspiration, philosophy, and craft.
All meetings will be hybrid, taking place in person at The Center for Fiction in Brooklyn (1:30pm ET) with audiences at the American Library in Paris (in Paris; 19h30 CEST) and the Center for the Art of Translation in San Francisco (10:30am PT) for a live streaming experience.
Supported in part by the Swiss Arts Council ProHelvetia.
Dorothee Elmiger was born in 1985 in Switzerland. She is the author of Out of the Sugar Factory, Shift Sleepers and Invitation to the Bold of Heart. She lives in New York City.
Kate Zambreno is the author most recently of Animal Stories, a collection on zoos and Kafka, part of Transit Books’ Undelivered Lectures series. A paperback of The Light Room is also forthcoming from Transit. Two novels, Foam and Performance Art, are forthcoming from Semiotext(e) in 2026 and 2027. They are a Ph.D. candidate in Performance Studies at NYU.