Adam Erlich Sachs Analyzes Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas

September 10, 2026

The Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast features a series of conversations with past and present Windham-Campbell Prize winners about their favorite books and plays. Hosted by Michael Kelleher.

For the finale of our 2026 season, Mike sits down with Adam Erlich Sachs (recipient of a 2026 Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction) to explore the Kantian complexities woven into Heinrich von Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas, as rendered in Michael Hoffman’s translation.

Adam Ehrlich Sachs is the author of three works of fiction—Gretel and the Great War (2024), The Organs of Sense (2019), and Inherited Disorders: Stories, Parables, and Problems (2016). The recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Literature (2018) and an American Academy in Berlin Fellowship (2019), Sachs lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania with his family.

The Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast is a program of The Windham-Campbell Prizes, which are administered by Yale University Library’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

The Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast is a production of Literary Hub

Hosted by Michael Kelleher

Theme music by Dani Lencioni

Produced and edited by Drew Broussard

Isabela Reyes

Isabela Reyes

I write about books as quiet places where memory, imagination, and culture meet. At PLAI, I explore literature through reviews, author stories, reading reflections, and the small details that make a story stay with us long after the final page.