j.kornbergf(at)gmail.com
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Berlin Atomized is a co-translation with Jack Rockwell of my first novel, “Atomizado Berlín,” which was published in 2021 in Buenos Aires and Mexico City.
“Berlin Atomized is the world bridged, coupled, and made fast—by the latest lost generation and by Julia Kornberg’s border-and-genre crossing talent, as restless as a flame.”
—Joshua Cohen
"Remarkable, tender, funny...[Berlin Atomized is] a novel in fragments floating in the great events of immanent youth.”
—Pola Oloixarac
“Punk song to a lost innocence and to the madness of history, this brilliant debut puts a new name, and a potent style, over the table: Julia Kornberg.” —Carlos Fonseca
“Ironic and always brilliant, tender and at the same time ruthless, with dazzling intelligence and whip-like sentences that showcase truth in every paragraph, this novel by Julia Kornberg imagines, invokes and exorcises the ghosts of her generation.”
—Federico Falco
“A striking debut from a new global voice.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred)
“An evocative portrait of disaffected youth and an unsettling, war-torn near future.... Readers will look forward to seeing what Kornberg does next.”
—Publishers Weekly
“[An] extraordinary first novel… It’s miraculous that Kornberg has been able to write a book that feels separate from that ghost world; instead, she unflinchingly captures the horror, absurdity, and beauty of how it feels to be alive right now.”
—Mikaela Dery, Los Angeles Review of Books
“Kornberg has alchemized all these potential pitfalls into a deft, exhilarating, surprising novel – one that portends a literary career to watch.”
— Megan Shub Peck, Haaretz
“Berlin Atomized is a globetrotting romp, a contra-hegemonic assault on the bullshit of a decaying, cowardly bourgeoisie seeking comfort in a history that never quite ended and a moving, even harrowing bildungsroman.”
—Federico Perelmuter, Full Stop
“The future of Kornberg as an author seems dazzlingly bright, and I can’t wait to read what she writes next.”
—Cody Oldweiler, Southwest Review of Books
“Kornberg, not yet 30, is a burgeoning talent. Her flickering, unflinching prose…makes you feel the siblings’ despair on every page…. The universe inside this book is not one any of us would want to spend time in—but Kornberg constructs and inhabits it with care and command.”
— E. Kinney Zalesne, Moment Magazine
Julia Kornberg’s Berlin Atomized is a lucid and incredibly intriguing novel. It is both a coming-of-age journey, fueled by the restless rage of adolescence, and an odyssey into a starkly realistic vision of a world on the verge of collapse . . . With a biting voice, Kornberg crafts an all-encompassing narrative that transcends the boundaries of the traditional novel. By the end, one feels the need to return to the beginning, as though to confirm it is the same book that has unfolded all along.
—Jessica Ruetter, Jewish Book Council
Berlin Atomized indeed explodes. Something is cracked open, and look, there: many more structural and linguistic possibilities than the shelves of contemporary bildungsromans by a disaffected monoglots would lead you to believe.
— Greta Rainbow, The Cleveland Review of Books
Kornberg writes in aphorisms; each sentence is like a bullet, targeting her characters and their milieu.
—Valerie Stivers, The Rumpus