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Affinity Konar United States of America    PWF 2017

Not content to sit around a pool in Los Angeles — Affinity Konar explores the hour of the wolf — the wild inhumanity of the Holocaust situated in the inhuman heart of Josef Mengele, the beast of Auschwitz, whose experiments were death.

Voice and language are the entry points of Mischling, the story of twin sisters who arrive in 1944 in Auschwitz as part of the experimental population of twins known as Mengele’s Zoo, where they are stripped of their identities, altered by the burdens of guilt and pain, and beset by the horrors of the mysterious pull of the word mischling—the Nazi legal term to denote a person of mixed Jewish and Aryan heritage.

“I didn’t want to obscure torment, but I wanted to show how someone would obscure torment in order to survive.”

Affinity Konar was born in 1978, and raised in California. She wanted to change her hippie-given first name for many years, but relented after hearing that it would be "a good name for a writer.”

In her first novel The Illustrated Version of Things, she “invented a sonorous language both brilliant and half-insane.” Mischling is slated for publication in 30 countries. 

Affinity Konar resides in Los Angeles.