Olga Tokarczuk and Jennifer Croft: The Books of Jacob
12:00 pm PT | 1:00 pm MT | 2:00 pm CT | 3:00 pm ET
Virtual Event
Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk and Man Booker winning translator Jennifer Croft join Michael Holtmann to celebrate the release of The Books of Jacob. Presented in partnership with Point Reyes Books and Green Apple Books on the Park.
About The Books of Jacob
The Nobel Prize-winner’s richest, most sweeping and ambitious novel yet follows the comet-like rise and fall of a mysterious, Messianic religious leader as he blazes his way across eighteenth-century Europe.
In the mid-eighteenth century, as new ideas—and a new unrest—begin to sweep the Continent, a young Jew of mysterious origins arrives in a village in Poland. Before long, he has changed not only his name but his persona; visited by what seem to be ecstatic experiences, Jacob Frank casts a charismatic spell that attracts an increasingly fervent following. In the decade to come, Frank will traverse the Hapsburg and Ottoman empires, throngs of disciples in his thrall as he reinvents himself again and again, converts to Islam and then Catholicism, is pilloried as a heretic and revered as the Messiah, and wreaks havoc on the conventional order, Jewish and Christian alike, with scandalous rumors of his sect’s secret rituals and the spread of his increasingly iconoclastic beliefs.
The story of Frank—a real historical figure around whom mystery and controversy swirl to this day—is the perfect canvas for the genius and unparalleled reach of Olga Tokarczuk. Narrated through the perspectives of his contemporaries—those who revere him, those who revile him, the friend who betrays him, the lone woman who sees him for what he is—The Books of Jacob captures a world on the cusp of precipitous change, searching for certainty and longing for transcendence.
Olga Tokarczuk is the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature and the Man Booker International Prize, and many other honors, including her country’s highest, the Nike. She is the author of nine novels and two short story collections, and has been translated into more than forty languages. She lives in Poland.
Jennifer Croft won a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship for her novel The Extinction of Irena Rey, the 2020 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing for her illustrated memoir Homesick, and the 2018 International Booker Prize for her translation from Polish of Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights. She is also the translator of Federico Falco’s A Perfect Cemetery, Romina Paula’s August, Pedro Mairal’s The Woman from Uruguay, and Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob (a finalist for the Kirkus Prize). In 2023, she received an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature. She lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma, with her husband and twins.
Michael Holtmann has worked in the arts for more than fifteen years. Prior to joining the Center, he held positions at the National Endowment for the Arts and the Folger Shakespeare Library. He has served on the board of the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) and the international programming committee of the Bay Area Book Festival.