IN-PERSON | Transnational Literature Series: Adèle Rosenfeld and Jeffrey Zuckerman with Laird Hunt

Join the Transnational Literature Series at Brookline Booksmith for an in-store event with author Adèle Rosenfeld and translator Jeffrey Zuckerman to discuss and celebrate the release of Jellyfish Have No Ears. They will be in conversation with writer Laird Hunt.

ASL interpretation will be provided for this event.

Since she was little, Louise has been not quite hearing and not quite deaf—her life with this invisible disability has been one of in-betweenness. After an audiology test shows that almost all her hearing is gone, her doctor suggests getting a cochlear implant. The operation will be irreversible, making the decision all the more fraught. The technology would give Louise a new sense of hearing—but it would be at the expense of her natural hearing, which, for all its weakness, has shaped her unique relationship with the world, full of whispers and shadows.

Hearing, for Louise, is inseparable from reading other people’s lips. Through sight, she perceives words and strings them together like pearls to reconstruct a conversation. But when the string breaks, misunderstandings result and eccentric images fill her thoughts. As she weighs the prospect of surgery, fabulous characters begin to accompany her: a damaged soldier from the First World War, an irritable dog named Cirrus, and a whimsical botanist. This ethereal world, full of terror and beauty and off-kilter humor, keeps erupting into the equally chaotic reality of Louise’s life as she experiences a new relationship, suffers through her first job, and steadies herself with friends.

With Jellyfish Have No Ears, Adèle Rosenfeld shines an extraordinary light on the black hole of losing a sense and on the vibrancy that can arise to fill the void.

Adèle Rosenfeld lives in Paris where she runs writing workshops. Jellyfish Have No Ears was a finalist for the 2023 Prix Goncourt for a first novel.

Jeffrey Zuckerman is an award-winning translator of French writers, including Jean Genet, Hervé Guibert, and Ananda Devi. He lives in New York.

Moderator Laird Hunt is the author of nine novels, including the 2021 National Book Award finalist Zorrie, as well as, most recently, a collection of linked stories, Float Up, Sing Down. A 2024 Guggenheim recipient in fiction, he is the winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Fiction, the Grand Prix de Littérature Américaine, the Bridge Prize and a finalist for both the Pen/Faulkner and the Prix Femina Étranger. Hunt’s reviews and essays have been published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Daily Beast, the Guardian, the Irish Times, and the Los Angeles Times, and his fiction and translations have appeared in many literary journals in the United States and abroad. A former United Nations press officer who was raised in Europe, Asia, and rural Indiana, he now lives in Providence where he teaches in Brown University’s Literary Arts Program.