Bill Johnston Celebrates Poland’s Epic 20th Century

THURSDAY |  NOVEMBER 15 | 12:30-1:30PM | 21+ |
Presented by Center for the Art of Translation | Space: Entire venue | Open to the Public |

Join us as we host Bill Johnston, the recipient of the 2011 Best Translated Book Award and the 2011 PEN Translation Award. Johnston received those honors for his amazing translation of Stone Upon Stone by Wieslaw Mysliwski, an action-packed epic of a modernizing Poland filled with bar fights, drinking, tales from the peasant life, and lots and lots of sex. It’s a little like a Polish One Hundred Years of Solitude, and it made Johnston so beloved that his publisher even made him his own t-shirt.

Come hear the celebrated, engaging Johnston talk about the career-capping masterpiece from one of Europe’s greatest 20th-century authors, a two-time recipient of Poland’s highest literary honor. Along the way you’ll find out what really happens in the Polish heartland during those long, cold winters, how hard it is to cross a busy highway with a horse and buggy, and the absurdly comic situations that a naive farmer can get into with his nation’s communist bureaucracy.