Tom McCarthy: On the Threshold of Being

03.09.2025 / 19:00 – 21:00
With Tom McCarthy

With Tom McCarthy and Ann Cotten

On September 3, we celebrate the publication of Tom McCarthy’s new book The Threshold and the Ledger (Notting Hill Editions, 2025) – a timely exploration of the writer Ingeborg Bachmann, who in the spring of 1963 became the first fellow of the then newly established Artists-in-Berlin Program. The author will present the book in conversation with Ann Cotten.

Since her untimely death in 1973, Ingeborg Bachmann has come to be regarded as one of the twentieth century’s most important writers. Unpacking a single Bachmann poem, novelist Tom McCarthy latches onto two of its central terms – the eponymous threshold and ledger – and takes off on a line of flight: through the work of Franz Kafka, David Lynch, Anne Carson, Sappho and Shakespeare.

Can writing be understood as an experience of the threshold, a limit- or boundary-state? A condition of ecstasy or ec-stasis, standing outside of oneself? With identity ruptured and surpassed, how and by whom might such experience be recorded?

Appearing on the eve of Bachmann’s centenary year, McCarthy’s book argues for the centrality of her vision to the very act of literature itself.

Link to book

daadgalerie
Oranienstraße 161
Berlin-Kreuzberg

Free admission
Conversation and Reading in English

Tom McCarthy is a novelist whose work has been translated into more than twenty languages and adapted for cinema, theatre and radio. He is recipient of the Believer Book Award and the Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction, an Internationaler Literaturpreis Finalist, and a two-time Booker Prize Finalist. He is also author of the study Tintin and the Secret of Literature, and of the essay collection Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish. His latest novel, The Making of Incarnation, was published in 2021. Since 2022 he has held the position of Miller Scholar at the Santa Fe Institute New Mexico. Born in Scotland, he is now a Swedish citizen, and lives in Berlin.

Ann Cotten was born in 1982 in Iowa and grew up in Vienna. Her literary work has received numerous awards, most recently the Gert Jonke Prize in 2021 and the Christine Lavant Prize in 2024. Her latest publications include the short story collection Lyophilia (2019), the poetic-theoretical volume Die Anleitungen der Vorfahren (2023), and her German translation of Rosmarie Waldrop’s The Hanky of Pippin’s Daughter (2021). Ann Cotten lives in Vienna and Berlin.

Photo Tom McCarthy: Christian Werner