Letti Park: Stories

In the stories of Letti Park, strangers wander into ordinary lives and change them in profound yet unknowable ways.

Judith Hermann’s masterful stories reveal the subtle but incontestable drama of what happens when we meet someone. Her characters have no defense against these intense and unpredictable encounters. They occur at random, without cause or provocation, and unfold beneath the threshold of comprehension. In Letti Park, Judith Hermann explores this all-important moment, our loneliness and rage and longing.

Judith Hermann was born in Berlin in 1970. She is the author of several novels and story collections, including Alice, which was short-listed for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize; Where Love Begins; and Summerhouse, Later, which won the Kleist Prize. Her novel Daheim (Home) was a Spiegel bestseller, won the Rheingau and the Bremen Literature Prizes, and was nominated for the Leipzig Book Fair Prize. Her work has been translated into thirty-five languages, and a number of her short stories have been adapted for film. She lives and works in Berlin.

Margot Bettauer Dembo (1928-2019) was the translator of works by Judith Hermann, Robert Gernhardt, Joachim Fest, Ödön von Horváth, and Feridun Zaimoglu, among others. She was awarded the Goethe-Institut/Berlin Translator’s Prize in 1994 and the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize in 2003. Dembo also worked as a translator for two feature documentary films: The Restless Conscience, which was nominated for an Academy Award, and The Burning Wall.