An Evening with Peter Rosei

Kelly Writers House

Thursday, February 19, 2004

5-6:30 pm
Kelly Writers House
3805 Locust Walk

Discussion with the writer: 3 p.m.
Max Kade Center
Room 329A, 3401 Walnut St.

(entrance next to Starbuck's)

Austrian Writer Peter Rosei will read from the new Ariadne Press collection of his writings, Ruthless and other Writings (2003). The reading will be in German and English. Rosei's American translator Geoffrey Howes will read the English versions.

Peter Rosei, born in Vienna in 1946, studied law and has been a freelance writer in Vienna since 1972. He is one of the most recognized and prolific authors writing in German today, having published novels, stories, poetry, plays, essays, travel writings, and children's literature.

Ruthless and Other Writings collects stories from several phases of Peter Rosei's career, as well as excerpts from the 1995 novel Persona, a philosophical journal, and selected poetry. In the stories translated here, Rosei presents aspects of the Austrian past, particularly the social and ethical conditions brought about by the end of the Habsburg Empire and the two World Wars. The characters, unique but somehow representative, emerge from the landscapes and cityscapes that Rosei describes with vivid precision. The admirable and ugly facets of human existence appear side by side, or even united within the same character or locale.

Among Rosei's novels are:

Der Aufstand (Salzburg/Wien: Residenz, 1987);
Rebus (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1990);
Persona (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1995);
Liebe & Tod (Wien/ Muenchen: Deuticke, 2000).