The Canvas

A novel as suspenseful as it is complex. -Deutsche Welle TV

Loosely based on the true story of Binjamin Wilkomirski, whose fabricated 1995 Holocaust memoir transfixed the reading public, The Canvas has a singular construction-its two inter-related narratives begin at either end of the book and meet in the middle.

Amnon Zichroni, a psychoanalyst in Zurich, encourages Minsky to write a book about his traumatic childhood experience in a Nazi death camp, a memoir which the journalist Jan Wechsler claims is a fiction. Ten years later, a suitcase arrives on Wechsler’s doorstep. Allegedly, he lost the suitcase an a trip to Israel, but Wechsler has no memory of the suitcase, nor the trip, and he travels to Israel to investigate the mystery. But it turns out he has been to Israel before, and his host on the trip, Amnon Zichroni, has been missing ever since…

A mind-bending investigation of memory, identity, truth, and delusion, The Canvas is the publishing event of the year, a novel whose meaning depends on the order in which it is read.

Benjamin Stein was born in East Berlin in 1970. He has worked as an editor and correspondent for various computer magazines and has been a corporate It advisor since 1998. He owns the author-run publishing house Edition Neue Moderne and writes the literary weblog Turmsegler. Benjamin Stein is married with two children and lives in Munich.

Brian Zumhagen has been a weekend anchor at WNYC since 2003. He received a grant from the Arthur F. Burns Fellowship to produce radio features for the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Canvas is his first book translation.