The Books of Jacob: Olga Tokarczuk with Jennifer Croft & Ruth Franklin

Co-presented with Greenlight Bookstore and co-curated by Anderson Tepper, BPL's February International Writers series features Olga Tokarczuk, author of The Books of Jacob, with translator and writer Jennifer Croft, as they discuss Tokarczuk’s magnum opus with Ruth Franklin.

Originally published in Poland in 2014, The Books of Jacob is Nobel Laureate Olga Tokarczuk’s masterwork that first earned her the attention of the Swedish Academy, which hailed her “narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life.” Translated by Jennifer Croft, the novel examines the legacy of Jacob Frank, a mid-eighteenth century Jewish mystic whose eventful life will crisscross Europe and its empires, straddle religions, and become enshrouded in controversy and mystery. Monumental in scope, The Books of Jacob is an ecstatic odyssey through a changing world in search of transcendence.

Participants

Olga Tokarczuk won the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature and the 2018 Man Booker International Prize, among many other honors. She is the author of a dozen works of fiction, two collections of essays, and a children’s book; her work has been translated into fifty languages. She lives in Poland.

Photo by Lukasz Giza

Jennifer Croft won the 2018 Man Booker International Prize for her translation of Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights and the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing for her memoir, Homesick. She lives in Los Angeles.

Photo by Chris Offutt

Ruth Franklin is a critic and biographer. Her book Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life (2016) won numerous awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography, and was named a New York Times Notable Book of 2016, a Time magazine top nonfiction book of 2016, and a “best book of 2016” by The Boston Globe, the San Francisco Chronicle, NPR, and others. She is also the author of A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction (2011), which was a finalist for the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Writing. Her criticism and essays appear in many publications, including the New Yorker (which published her profile of Olga Tokarczuk in July 2019), The New York Times Magazine, the New York Review of Books, and Harper’s. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in biography, a Cullman Fellowship at the New York Public Library, a Leon Levy Fellowship in biography, and the Roger Shattuck Prize for Criticism.

Series curator Anderson Tepper is co-chair of the International Committee of the Brooklyn Book Festival and has written for The New York Times Book Review, Vanity Fair, World Literature Today, and Words without Borders, among other publications.

Greenlight Bookstore is our bookseller for this event. You can purchase/preorder the book here.