Old Rendering Plant Happy Hour
Goethe-Institut San Francisco | ART-Lounge | 530 Bush Street (entrance street level) | San Francisco, California
Doors at 5:30. Reading will begin shortly after 6:00.
This event has already taken place.
Join us for happy hour to celebrate the release of Old Rendering Plant, our second book by Wolfgang Hilbig, translated from German by Isabel Fargo Cole. Stop by the Goethe-Institut San Francisco after work for a drink and a snack and hear readings from the book by Two Lines Press staff.
In Old Rendering Plant Wolfgang Hilbig turns his febrile, hypnotic prose to the intersection of identity, language, and history’s darkest chapters, immersing readers in the odors and oozings of a butchery that has for years dumped biological waste into a river. It starts when a young boy becomes obsessed with an empty and decayed coal plant, coming to believe that it is tied to mysterious disappearances throughout the countryside. But as a young man, with the building now turned into an abattoir processing dead animals, he revisits this place and his memories of it, realizing just how much he has missed. Plumbing memory’s mysteries while evoking historic horrors, Hilbig gives us a gothic testament for the silenced and the speechless. With a tone worthy of Poe and a syntax descended from Joyce, this suggestive, menacing tale refracts the lost innocence of youth through the heavy burdens of maturity.
This event is supported in part by grants from the San Francisco Arts Commission and from San Francisco Grants for the Arts.
