BOOK PRESENTATION:
PERFECTION
BY
VINCENZO LATRONICO
The Author in conversation with
LAUREN OYLER
Event in collaboration with
New York Review Books
Perfection—Vincenzo Latronico’s first book to be translated into English by Sophie Hughes (NYRB, 2025)—is a scathing novel about contemporary existence, a tale of two people gradually waking up to find themselves in various traps, wondering how it all came to be. Was it a lack of foresight, or were they just born too late?
Perfection is dense with ideas, feelings, political insights, beautiful turns of phrase, unexpected observations about ordinary occurrences – all the qualities I look for (and appreciate in real time) when reading fiction.’
— Alice Gregory, New Yorker
Anna and Tom, an expat couple, have fashioned a dream life for themselves in Berlin. They are young digital “creatives” exploring the excitements of the city, freelancers without too many constraints, who spend their free time cultivating house plants and their images online. At first, they reasonably deduce that they’ve turned their passion for aesthetics into a viable, even enviable career, but the years go by, and Anna and Tom grow bored. As their friends move back home or move on, so their own work and sex life—and the life of Berlin itself—begin to lose their luster. An attempt to put their politics into action fizzles in embarrassed self-doubt. Edging closer to forty, they try living as digital nomads only to discover that, wherever they go, “the brand of oat milk in their flat whites was the same.”
Born in Rome, Vincenzo Latronico studied philosophy at the University of Milan and has since published numerous books in Italian, including La Cospirazione delle Colombe -The Conspiracy of Doves and Ginnastica e Rivoluzione– Gymnastics and Revolution. In addition to his own writing, he has also translated the work of many writers into Italian including work by George Orwell, Oscar Wilde, and Alexander Dumas. He lives in Milan.
Lauren Oyler is the author of the essay collection No Judgment (2024) and the novel Fake Accounts (2021). Her essays and criticism appear regularly in the New Yorker, the New York Times, the London Review of Books, and many other publications, and she is a contributing editor at Harper’s magazine. She lives in Berlin.
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