etb English
Theatre
Berlin International Performing Arts Center

THE US EMBASSY LITERATURE SERIES:
Anthony Marra reads from his novel A Constellation of Vital Phenomena (Die niedrigen Himmel / Suhrkamp-Verlag 2014)

Two doctors risk everything to save the life of a hunted child in this majestic debut about love, loss, and the unexpected ties that bind us together. “On the morning after the Feds burned down her house and took her father, Havaa woke from dreams of sea anemones.” Havaa, eight years old, hides in the woods and watches the blaze until her neighbor, Akhmed, discovers her sitting in the snow. Akhmed knows getting involved means risking his life, and there is no safe place to hide a child in a village where informers will do anything for a loaf of bread, but for reasons of his own, he sneaks her through the forest to the one place he thinks she might be safe: an abandoned hospital where the sole remaining doctor, Sonja Rabina, treats the wounded. Though Sonja protests that her hospital is not an orphanage, Akhmed convinces her to keep Havaa for a trial, and over the course of five extraordinary days, Sonja’s world will shift on its axis and reveal the intricate pattern of connections that weaves together the pasts of these three unlikely companions and unexpectedly decides their fate.

Anthony Marra is the New York Times bestselling author of a National Book Awards Longlist selection, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena. He is the winner of a Whiting Award, a Pushcart Prize, The Atlantic’s Student Writing Contest, and the Narrative Prize and his work was anthologized in Best American Nonrequired Reading 2012. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a former Stegner Fellow, he now teaches at Stanford University. He has lived and studied in Eastern Europe, and resides in Oakland, CA.

Photo Anthony Marra: Heike Steinweg / Suhrkamp Verlag

THE US EMBASSY LITERATURE SERIES:
Justin Go reads from his upcoming novel The Steady Running of the Hour ( Der stete Lauf der Stunden / Hoffmann und Campe-Verlag, 2014).

In this mesmerizing debut, a young American discovers he may be heir to the unclaimed estate of an English World War I officer, which launches him on a quest across Europe to uncover the elusive truth. Just after graduating college, Tristan Campbell receives a letter delivered by special courier to his apartment in San Francisco. It contains the phone number of a Mr. J. F. Prichard of Twyning & Hooper, Solicitors, in London—and news that could change Tristan’s life forever. The Steady Running of the Hour is a literary novel about a young man’s quest to inherit a fortune from the 1920s. The book involves many historical settings, including the Battle of the Somme and the British 1924 Mount Everest Expedition.

Justin Go was born in Los Angeles to a Japanese father and an American mother. He was trained as a historian at UC Berkeley and holds an MA in English from University College London. Justin has lived in Tokyo, Paris, London, New York City and Berlin, among other places. He is currently working on a second novel.

Photo Justin Go: Marco Grundt

THE US EMBASSY LITERATURE SERIES:
Michael Lederer reads from his upcoming novel Cadaqués.

Cal is an American writer who drinks more than he writes.  Layla is a beautiful young English woman interested in literature.  One can be too careful in life, or one can be too wild.  Where is the line?  In this small fishing village near the Spanish / French border, where once lived Salvador Dali, Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Picasso, and other greats, a new generation of artists and writers continue in those decadent footsteps.  As one character puts it, “No Lost Generation here, darling.  This is Cadaqués.  We are finding ourselves!”

Michael Lederer is an American novelist, short story writer, poet and playwright currently living in Berlin, Germany. He is also the Founder and Artistic Director of the Dubrovnik Shakespeare Festival in Dubrovnik, Croatia. In 1984-85, Lederer wrote his first novel, Nothing Lasts Forever Anymore, while living in La Herradura, a fishing village in southern Spain. The story of a family that must decide whether to sell their small farm to real estate developers was published in 1999 in Barcelona and Cadaqués by a small publishing house called Parsifal Ediciones as Ya Nada Dura Eternamente. In 2001, the Catalan writer David Marti, reviewing the book in the French literary journal “Remanences,” wrote “No one as yet has been able, like Michael Lederer, to engender the calmness of our life and dreams on the shores of the frail yet powerful Mediterranean Sea.” In March 2013, a revised edition of Nothing Lasts Forever Anymore (Nichts ist mehr für die Ewigkeit) was published in both English and German by PalmArt Press in Berlin and presented at the Leipzig Book Fair. The Great Game. Berlin-Warsaw Express and Other Stories, a collection of short stories and sonnets, was published in Berlin in 2012 by PalmArt Press in both English and German. Michael is currently working on a new novel, The Land, to be published in the fall of 2014. Die Welt has called him “among the great American writers.”

with a joint reading from their works and discussion.

The U.S. Embassy Literature Series

Kiran Desai won the 2006 Booker Prize for her novel The Inheritance of Loss (dt. Erbin des verlorenen Landes). She is the daughter of Indian writer Anita Desai, grew up in India and England and has lived in the US since 1977.

Her first novel, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard (1998, dt. Der Guru im Guavenbaum) won numerous awards, followed by the international bestseller The Inheritance of Loss.

Kiran Desai is the current Holtzbrinck Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin.

Ben Marcus is the author of three novels, The Age of Wire and String (1995), Notable American Women (2002) and The Flame Alphabet (2012, dt. Flammenalphabet). His stories, essays and reviews have appeared in numerous publications.

He is an Associate Professor at Columbia University and lives in New York City and Brooklin, Maine.

Ben Marcus is currently Mary Ellen von der Heyden Fellow in Fiction at the American Academy in Berlin.

Foto Desai: Beowulf Sheehan/PEN American Center