The German Book Office has chosen The Canvas by Benjamin Stein, translated by Brian Zumhagen, as its September book of the month. The novel will be published on September 26 by Open Letter Books ($16.95, 9781934824658).
The publisher wrote: "Loosely based on the true story of Binjamin Wilkomirski, whose fabricated 1995 Holocaust memoir transfixed the reading public, The Canvas has a singular construction--its two interrelated narratives begin at either end of the book and meet in the middle. Amnon Zichroni, a psychoanalyst in Zurich, encourages Minsky to write a book about his traumatic childhood experience in a Nazi death camp, a memoir that the journalist Jan Wechsler claims is a fiction. Ten years later, a suitcase arrives on Wechsler's doorstep. Allegedly, he lost the suitcase on a trip to Israel, but Wechsler has no memory of the suitcase, nor the trip, and he travels to Israel to investigate the mystery. But it turns out he has been to Israel before, and his host on the trip, Amnon Zichroni, has been missing ever since.
"A mind-bending investigation of memory, identity, truth, and delusion, The Canvas is... a novel whose meaning depends on the order in which it is read."
Born in East Berlin in 1970, Benjamin Stein was an editor and correspondent for various computer magazines and has been a corporate IT adviser since 1998. He owns the author-run publishing house Edition Neue Moderne and writes the literary weblog Turmsegler.
Brian Zumhagen has been a weekend anchor at WNYC since 2003. His career in journalism started in 1993, with an internship in the press office of the German Green Party's parliamentary delegation. He also won a grant from the Arthur F. Burns Fellowship to produce radio features for the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
