Binnie Kirshenbaum

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Binnie Kirshenbaum (* 1964 ) is an American author . Since 2003 she is professor of creative writing at the School of the Arts of Columbia University and lives in New York City .

life and work

Kirshenbaum was born the daughter of Jewish immigrants. She studied at Brooklyn College and Columbia University. In 1990 she published her first volume of short stories and in 1992 her first novel (On Mermaid Avenue) . Since then she has published five other novels and a volume of short stories with female - mostly Jewish - main characters and often tragicomic plot. Her female characters are obsessed with sex, politically incorrect, but they suffer from their love affairs and from their loneliness. Grief, frustration and humor often alternate suddenly.

Hester Among the Ruins (2002; German: Decisions in a Fall von Liebe , 2003), a love story “between the victim's daughter and the perpetrator's son” in the shadow of World War II , was nominated for the American Jewish Book Award . Kirshenbaum comments on this book for the German reader as follows: “At some point he realizes that humor is involved. He begins to laugh hesitantly [...] The wrong [...] thing about the stooped posture that makes the Holocaust the national heritage of the Germans should be denounced. I'll put the reader on a shaking grate and he'll come down as someone else. "

Binnie Kirshenbaum received the Book Critics' Choice Award twice . Her work, which has been translated into eight languages, is also featured in magazines and anthologies .

Works in German translation

  • A brief outline of my career as an adulteress
  • Me, my girlfriend and all these men
  • Mermaid Avenue
  • An almost perfect moment
  • The story of Henry and me
  • Choices in a case of love
  • Not a penny for nothing (short stories)
  • Small philosophy of passions: flea markets (illustrated)

(all published by dtv Munich and Hoffmann & Campe in Hamburg)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Politically correct humility attitude. ( Memento from December 1, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Conversation with the Jüdischen Allgemeine , undated, accessed May 1, 2017.
  2. ↑ Review in: Der Spiegel , June 17, 1996
personal data
SURNAME Kirshenbaum, Binnie
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American author
DATE OF BIRTH 1964