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Jennifer Croft
March 12 @ 7:00 pm - 8:00 pm
The Oklahoma Center for Humanities and Magic City Books invite you to join us for a celebration for TU President’s Professor Jennifer Croft and her new book The Extinction of Irena Rey on Tuesday March 12, 2024.
From the International Booker Prize-winning translator and Women’s Prize finalist, The Extinction of Irena Rey is an utterly beguiling novel about eight translators and their search for a world-renowned author who goes missing in a primeval Polish forest. Publisher’s Weekly has called it “mirthful,” “energetic,” “wickedly funny,” “absurdly entertaining,” “juicy,” “twisty,” and “poignant.”
The Extinction of Irena Rey will be published by Bloomsbury Publishing on March 5, 2024. Books are available to pre-order at Magic City Books or online at: https://magiccitybooks.square.site/product/the-extinction-of-irena-rey/1752. The Extinction of Irena Rey, as well as other books by Jennifer Croft, will be for sale at the event on March 12.
Reception with wine and light appetizers to follow.
About The Extinction of Irena Rey
Eight translators arrive at a house in a primeval Polish forest on the border of Belarus. It belongs to the world-renowned author Irena Rey, and they are there to translate her magnum opus, Gray Eminence. But within days of their arrival, Irena disappears without a trace.
The translators, who hail from eight different countries but share the same reverence for their beloved author, begin to investigate where she may have gone while proceeding with work on her masterpiece. They explore this ancient wooded refuge with its intoxicating slime molds and lichens and study her exotic belongings and layered texts for clues. But doing so reveals secrets-and deceptions-of Irena Rey’s that they are utterly unprepared for. Forced to face their differences as they grow increasingly paranoid in this fever dream of isolation and obsession, soon the translators are tangled up in a web of rivalries and desire, threatening not only their work but the fate of their beloved author herself.
This hilarious, thought-provoking debut novel is a brilliant examination of art, celebrity, the natural world, and the power of language. It is an unforgettable, unputdownable adventure with a small but global cast of characters shaken by the shocks of love, destruction, and creation in one of Europe’s last great wildernesses.
Jennifer Croft won a Guggenheim Fellowship for this novel, the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing for her memoir Homesick, and the International Booker Prize for her translation of Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights. She is the translator of Federico Falco’s A Perfect Cemetery, Romina Paula’s August, Pedro Mairal’s The Woman from Uruguay, and Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob. She has also received the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature. She lives in Tulsa and Los Angeles.
