Olivier Guez - "The Disappearance of Josef Mengele" - Alison James

Monday, November 7, 2022 - 6:00pm - 7:00pm
Event Presenter/Author: 
Olivier Guez

Olivier Guez will discuss his novel The Disappearance of Josef Mengele. He will be joined in conversation by Alison James

This is an in-person event at the Seminary Co-op. At this time, masks are required for in-store events. 

Presented in partnership with France Chicago Center and Villa Albertine Chicago. 

Register HERE

About the book: For three decades, until the day he collapsed in the Brazilian surf in 1979, Josef Mengele, the Angel of Death who performed horrific experiments on the prisoners of Auschwitz, floated through South America in linen suits, keeping two steps ahead of Mossad agents, international police and the world’s journalists. In this rigorously researched factual novel—drawn almost entirely from historical documents—Olivier Guez traces Mengele’s footsteps through these years of flight. This chilling novel situates the reader in a literary manhunt on the trail of one of the most elusive and evil figures of the twentieth century. Translation by Georgia de Chamberet.

About the author: Olivier Guez is the author of novels and essays translated into more than thirty languages including American spleen, L’Impossible retour (A History of Jews in Germany since 1945), Praise of Dodging and The Revolutions of Jacques Koskas. His The Disappearance of Josef Mengele, released this year by Verso, was the recipient of the 2017 prix Renaudot. It has been translated worldwide and is currently adapted for the screen. Guez is also the co-author of the screenplay der Staat gegen Fritz Bauer (Fritz Bauer, a German Hero), for which he won the 2016 German Oscar for best script. As a journalist, he has contributed to Le Monde, Point, the New York Times, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and the Corriere della Sera. He has lived in England, Nicaragua, Brussels, Berlin, and Paris, and currently lives in Rome. Author photo by Claude Truong-Ngoc. 

About the interlocutor: Alison James is Professor of French Literature at the University of Chicago. Her work focuses on twentieth- and twenty-first-century French literature, with a particular focus on post-World War II experimental writing, representations of everyday life, chance and contingency in literature, and nonfiction narrative. She is the author of Constraining Chance: Georges Perec and the Oulipo (Northwestern University Press, 2009) and The Documentary Imagination in Twentieth-Century French Literature (Oxford University Press, 2020). Alison's current research turns to the other side of the coin and to more recent literary production, exploring shifting conceptions of fiction and uses of fictionality in the last three decades.

Event Location: 
Seminary Co-op Bookstores
5751 S Woodlawn Ave
Chicago, IL 60637