Archives | Authors | Arnon Grunberg
Arnon Grunberg Netherlands PWF 2020, 2019, 2015, 2012, 2007
Arnon Grunberg is one of the most subtly outrageous provocateurs in world literature. Born in 1971 in Amsterdam into a German-Jewish family, he stepped aside to unnerve a wider audience.
“I really need enemies—without enemies there’s no identity.”
For Grunberg—read talent. This Christmas he’s in Nepal or Belarus. We see him as a waiter, a masseuse in Bucharest, working undercover in a Bavarian hotel, in Guantánamo Bay, visiting the troops in Afghanistan and Iraq. That’s why he moved to Park Avenue.
“I like observing. There’s a spy in all authors.”
Grunberg shares a natural affinity with Isaac Babel—not just the glasses—but the love of life, the heart of darkness—“brutal and altogether winning.”
His work includes: Blue Mondays, Silent Extras, Phantom Pain, The History of My Baldness, The Asylum Seeker, The Jewish Messiah, Tirza, and Amuse-Bouche. A collection of essays—Chambermaids and Soldiers— recalls his time in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Arnon Grunberg lives in New York.
Arnon Grunberg: Flying Females
10.12.2007 Readings
We went out to dinner one last time with Mrs Lopez and Emile. Elvira was with us. We had to convince her it was better if she went along. Her mother had on her five-inch heels again.
Arnon Grunberg: I Still Own Twenty Horses in Berlin
10.12.2007 Readings
My father was a stamp dealer, or at least that's what we I v I assumed, my mother and I. I'd been told by my mother that his father had owned a drugstore. A drugstore on a cart. He used to push this cart through Berlin all day long. "One day they found him lying dead on top of his cart," she said, "but it wasn't on account of the storm troopers. It was on account of the Neun' undneunziger vodka." A little later she said, "But my parents had a furniture store, in fact two in the end, and we didn't get a single cent for either, not a single cent."
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