SMALLTOWNNOVELLA

When leif becomes fearful of the consequences of their affair, he instigates a community-wide assault. Written in a brilliant, all-lowercase, stream-of-consciousness, Schernikau’s novella is a radical reimagining of the German Bildungsroman.


A reading of the novella will be followed by a conversation between translator Lucy Jones and UDP editor C. Bain.



Lucy Jones is a British writer and literary translator from the German who lives in Berlin. She has translated the work of Anke Stelling, Silke Scheuermann and Ronald M. Schernikau, among others, and was runner-up in the 2023 Schlegel-Tieck Prize for her translation of Die Geschwister (Siblings) by Brigitte Reimann. Her own short creative non-fiction has appeared in SAND, Pigeon Pages NYC, LitroMag and others. She is currently writing her first book.


C. Bain is a gender liminal writer and performance artist who works on the interstices of violence, extraction, and the erotic. His plays have been shown at the Tank, Dixon Place, and the LGBT Center in NYC. Previous performances include the Getty Center, MOCA Los Angeles, the Highline, and HKW. He is author of the books Debridement and Sex Augury. He has a studio art MFA from CalArts and a social work degree from Hunter College. He was a 2023–24 Fulbright scholar in Leipzig, researching the end of the world.