DUNES LITERARY SERIES

Max Lawton discusses and reads from his translations.

The reader for the first IU Northwest Dunes Lit Series reading of the new academic year is Max Lawton, who will read online on Wednesday, October 4, at 6:30 PM CDT. Register for this free virtual event below:

Translator extraordinaire, Max Lawton has translated and placed eight books by Russian novelist and short fiction writer Vladimir Sorokin, including Telluria and Their Four Hearts, as well as the forthcoming Blue Lard, Red Pyramid and Other Stories, and Dispatches from the District Committee. Currently, he is also at work on translations of Michael Lentz’s Schattenfroh and Antonio Moresco’s Games of Eternity trilogy.

Lawton works in translation of narrative not afraid to both playfully and brutally explore the twentieth century in its fragmented shape and memory. In a recent interview with Biblioklept, Max described Sorokin’s Telluria as “an ode to difference. And a challenge to land-grabbing, logos-hijacking imperialists who believe in a single story. For Sorokin, the world is a million different textures, a million different languages, and no ONE can be said to triumph.”

A doctoral student at Columbia University, he teaches Russian and is writing on the novel in and out of the Twentieth Century. Max is also a novelist, screenwriter, and a member of the band, White Nothing.