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Beth Ann Fennelly and Tom Franklin

The U.S. Embassy Literature Series:

Beth Ann Fennelly and Tom Franklin read from and discuss their joint novel The Tilted World and their forthcoming works.

 

Tom Franklin, winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship, is the author of a collection of stories, Poachers, which won the Edgar Award for its title novella. He has written three novels, Hell at the Breech, Smonk and Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter, which won the Willie Morris Prize in Southern Fiction, the LA Times Book Award for Mystery/Thriller and the UK’s Golden Dagger Award for Best Novel. Most recently, he co-wrote The Tilted World, a novel, with his wife, Beth Ann Fennelly. He is based in in Oxford, Mississippi, where he teaches in the University of Mississippi’s MFA program, but is currently the recipient of a fellowship from the American Academy in Berlin.

Beth Ann Fennelly, Poet Laureate of Mississippi, teaches in the MFA Program at the University of Mississippi, where she was named Outstanding Teacher of the Year. She’s won grants and awards from the N.E.A., the United States Artists, a Pushcart and a Fulbright to Brazil. Fennelly has published three books of poetry: Open House, Tender Hooks, and Unmentionables, as well as a book of nonfiction, Great with Child, all with W. W. Norton.  The Tilted World, a novel she co-authored with her husband, Tom Franklin, was published by HarperCollins. Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs will be published by Norton in the fall of 2017. Fennelly and Franklin live in Oxford with their three children.

Joshua Hammer

THE U.S. EMBASSY LITERATURE SERIES:
Joshua Hammer reads from The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu and Their Race to Save the World’s Most Precious Manuscripts (2016)

the-bad-ass-librarians-of-timbuktu-9781476777405_hrTo save precious centuries-old Arabic texts from Al Qaeda, a band of librarians in Timbuktu pulls off a brazen heist worthy of Ocean’s Eleven. In the 1980s, a young adventurer and collector for a government library, Abdel Kader Haidara, journeyed across the Sahara Desert and along the Niger River, tracking down and salvaging tens of thousands of ancient Islamic and secular manuscripts that had fallen into obscurity.

The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu tells the incredible story of how Haidara, a mild-mannered archivist and historian from the legendary city of Timbuktu, later became one of the world’s greatest and most brazen smugglers. In 2012, thousands of Al Qaeda militants from northwest Africa seized control of most of Mali, including Timbuktu. They imposed Sharia law, chopped off the hands of accused thieves, stoned to death unmarried couples, and threatened to destroy the great manuscripts. As the militants tightened their control over Timbuktu, Haidara organized a dangerous operation to sneak all 350,000 volumes out of the city to the safety of southern Mali.

Joshua Hammer joined the staff of Newsweek as a business and media writer in 1988, and served as a bureau chief and correspondent-at-large on five continents between 1992 and 2006. Hammer is now a contributing editor to Smithsonian and Outside, a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books, and has written for publications including the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, the Condé Nast Traveler, the Atlantic Monthly, and the Atavist. Joshua Hammer has been awarded the National Magazine Award 2016 in the category “reporting.”

Inkblot Berlin – Berlin Writers Read

Inkblot Berlin gives you the chance to hear the voices behind the words. Working writers from the city read their drama, poetry and prose.

Formed in the furnace of the writing scene in Berlin, Inkblot seeks to shine a light on what is happening in the writing groups and draughty garrets of this vibrant capital. For this inaugural event we present Mary Kelly, twice published playwright from Dublin, Madhvi Ramani a polymath who writes for children and adults and Ben Maddox, who turns his bitter gaze onto rural life. Let us tell you our stories.

Anthony Marra

THE US EMBASSY LITERATURE SERIES:
Anthony Marra reads from The Tsar of Love and Techno: Stories (2015)

$_35Anthoyn Marra´s collection of stories introduces a cast of remarkable characters whose lives intersect in ways both life-affirming and heartbreaking. A 1930s Soviet censor painstakingly corrects offending photographs, deep underneath Leningrad, bewitched by the image of a disgraced prima ballerina. A chorus of women recount their stories and those of their grandmothers, former gulag prisoners who settled their Siberian mining town. Two pairs of brothers share a fierce, protective love. Young men across the former USSR face violence at home and in the military. And great sacrifices are made in the name of an oil landscape unremarkable except for the almost incomprehensibly peaceful past it depicts. In stunning prose, with rich character portraits and a sense of history reverberating into the present, The Tsar of Love and Techno is a captivating work.

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

Tom Leveen

 The U.S. Embassy Literature Series

Tom Leveen reads from his young adult novel Random (Ich hätte es wissen sollen, Hanser Verlag)

Random

Who’s the real victim here? A tense and gripping exploration of cyberbullying and teen suicide.

Late at night Tori receives a random phone call. It’s a wrong number. But the caller seems to want to talk, so she stays on the line. He asks for a single thing—one reason not to kill himself.

The request plunges her into confusion. Because if this random caller actually does what he plans, he’ll be the second person connected to Tori to take his own life. And the first just might land her in jail. After her Facebook page became Exhibit A in a tragic national news story about cyberbullying, Tori can’t help but suspect the caller is a fraud. But what if he’s not? Her words alone may hold the power of life or death.

With the clock ticking, Tori has little time to save a stranger—and maybe redeem herself—leading to a startling conclusion that changes everything.

 

 

Tom Leveen is the author of Random, Sick, manicpixiedreamgirl, Party, and Zero (a YALSA Best Book of 2013). A frequent speaker at schools and conferences, Tom was previously the artistic director and co-founder of an all-ages, non-profit visual and performing venue in Scottsdale, Arizona. He is an Arizona native, where he lives with his wife and young son.

Amy Bloom

THE U.S. EMBASSY LITERATURE SERIES:
Amy Bloom reads from her novel Lucky Us (Wir Glücklichen | Hoffmann und Campe)
LuckyUs“My father’s wife died. My mother said we should drive down to his place and see what might be in it for us.” – So begins the story of teenage half-sisters Eva and Iris in this brilliantly written, deeply moving, and fantastically funny novel by the beloved and critically acclaimed author of Away. Disappointed by their families, Iris, the hopeful star, and Eva, the sidekick, journey across 1940s America in search of fame and fortune. Iris’s ambitions take the sisters from small-town Ohio to an unexpected and sensuous Hollywood, across the America of Reinvention in a stolen station wagon, to the jazz clubs and golden mansions of Long Island. With their friends in high and low places, Iris and Eva stumble and shine through a landscape of big dreams, scandals, betrayals, and war. Filled with memorable characters and unexpected turns, Lucky Us is a thrilling and resonant novel about success and failure, good luck and bad, and the pleasures and inevitable perils of family life. From Brooklyn’s beauty parlors to London’s West End, these unforgettable people love, lie, cheat, and survive in this story of our fragile, absurd, heroic species.

bloom_amy-c-Deborah-FeingoldAmy Bloom is author of two novels, three collections of short stories, and a nominee for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her most recent novel, Away, was an epic story about a Russian immigrant. Her recent collection of short stories, Where the God of Love Hangs Out, came out in January 2010. She lives in Connecticut and taught at Yale University for the last decade. She is now Wesleyan University’s Distinguished University Writer in Residence.

Headshot: Deborah Feingold

Tom Drury

THE U.S. EMBASSY LITERATURE SERIES | Mary Ellen von der Heyden Book Presentation:
Tom Drury reads from his novel The Driftless Area (Das stille Land | Klett-CottaVerlag)

Driftless-AreaSet in the rugged region of the Midwest that gives the novel its title, The Driftless Area is the story of Pierre Hunter, a young bartender with unfailing optimism, a fondness for coin tricks, and an uncanny capacity for finding trouble: When his girlfriend gets pneumonia, Pierre is banished from the hospital. When he goes skating on the lake, he finds the lone stretch of bad ice. And when he falls in love, with the mysterious and isolated Stella Rosmarin, Pierre becomes the central player in a revenge drama he must unravel and bring to its shocking conclusion. Along the way he will liberate $77,000 from a murderous thief, summon the resources that have eluded him all his life, and come to question the very meaning of chance and mortality.  For nothing is as it seems in The Driftless Area. Identities shift, violent secrets lie in wait, the future can cause the past, and love becomes a mission that can take you beyond this world. In its tender, cool irony, The Driftless Area recalls the best of neonoir, and its cast of bona fide small-town eccentrics adrift in the American Midwest make for a clever and deeply pleasurable read from one of our most beloved authors.

“Like most of his previous work, Tom Drury’s latest novel could just as well be titled, “What’s the Matter With Iowa?” This is not the heartland as we’ve been led to understand it. Anything but the repository of American normalcy, Drury’s raggedy slice of the Midwest teems with vagrants and thieves, even a drug dealer who doubles as a rental car agent. …

The book’s title The Driftless Area refers to an actual geological anomaly in the Midwest that sat undisturbed while the continental glacier receded. Wisely, Drury doesn’t overplay the metaphor, but he does challenge the reader’s patience in the book’s plunge into the mystical. “The Driftless Area” builds up surprising locomotion as Shane pursues the hapless Pierre. The conclusion is an absolute thrill, until it suddenly leaps off the rails. Characters we’re perfectly content to hang with on mortal turf ultimately descend further through the author’s trap door and then up into … well, let’s just say it isn’t Des Moines. This fine, ambling novel ends with a tug of war between the spiritual we don’t altogether trust and the grind we’re somehow unable to resist.”    – The New York Times

Drury_Tom_swTom Drury is the author of Pacific, The End of Vandalism, Hunts in Dreams, The Driftless Area, and The Black Brook. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, and the Mississippi Review. Drury has been a Guggenheim Fellow and was named one of Granta‘s “Best Young American Novelists.” He lives in New York.

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

Brittani Sonnenberg

THE U.S. EMBASSY LITERATURE SERIES:
Brittani Sonnenberg reads from her novel Home Leave.

SonnenbergChris Kriegstein is a man on the move, with a global career that catapults his family across North America, Europe, and Asia. For his wife, Elise, the hardship of chronic relocation is soothed by the allure of reinvention. Over the years, Elise shape-shifts: once a secretive Southern Baptist, she finds herself becoming a seasoned expat in Shanghai, an unapologetic adulterer in Thailand, and, finally, a renowned interior decorator in Madison. But it’s the Kriegstein daughters, Leah and Sophie, who face the most tumult. Fiercely protective of each other–but also fiercely competitive–the two sisters long for stability in an ever-changing environment. With each new move, the girls find they can count on only one thing: the consoling, confounding presence of each other. When the family suffers an unimaginable loss, they can’t help but wonder: Was it meant to be, or did one decision change their lives forever? And what does it mean when home is everywhere and nowhere at the same time? With humor and heart, Brittani Sonnenberg chases this wildly loveable family through the excitement and anguish of their adventures around the world.

Brittani Sonnenberg has an MFA from the University of Michigan and lives in Berlin, where she is a frequent contributor to Berlin Stories on NPR. She is currently a visiting lecturer at the MFA program of the University of Hong Kong. Her award-winning fiction has been widely published in magazines such as Ploughshares, anthologized in the O’Henry Short Story Prize Series, and received distinguished story recognition by Best American Short Stories. Her non-fiction has been published by Time Magazine, the Associated Press, NPR, Minneapolis Star Tribune, and elsewhere. She studied English literature with a citation in Mandarin Chinese at Harvard University. She was a European Journalism Fellow at Berlin’s Freie Universität from 2009-2010 and served as the editor of the American Academy’s Berlin Journal from 2011-2013. Home Leave is her first novel.
Photo:  Alex Trebus

Joshua Cohen

THE U.S. EMBASSY LITERATURE SERIES:
Joshua Cohen reads from his collection Four New Messages (Vier neue Nachrichten / Schöffling 2014)

Four New MessagesIn “Emission,” a hapless drug dealer in Princeton is humiliated when a cruel co-ed exposes him exposing himself on a blog gone viral. “McDonald’s” tells of a frustrated pharmaceutical copywriter whose imaginative flights fail to bring solace because of a certain word he cannot put down on paper. In “The College Borough” a father visiting NYU with his daughter remembers a former writing teacher, a New Yorker exiled to the Midwest who refuses to read his students’ stories, asking them instead to build a replica of the Flatiron Building. “Sent” begins mythically in the woods of Russia, but in a few virtuosic pages plunges into the present, where an aspiring journalist finds himself in a village that shelters all the women who’ve starred in all the internet porn he’s ever enjoyed.

Joshua Cohen was born in 1980 in New Jersey. He is the author of five previous books, including Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto, A Heaven of Others, and Witz. His nonfiction has appeared in Bookforum, Harper’s, and other publications. He received the 2013 Matanel Prize in Jewish Literature and the Pushcart Prize 2012 and was listed among the top 20 under 40 writers by The New Yorker.

Karin Slaughter

THE U.S. EMBASSY LITERATURE SERIES:
Karin Slaughter reads from her novel Criminal (Bittere Wunden / Blanvalet Verlag 2014)

CriminalWill Trent is a brilliant agent with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. Newly in love, he is beginning to put a difficult past behind him. Then a local college student goes missing, and Will is inexplicably kept off the case by his supervisor and mentor, deputy director Amanda Wagner. Will cannot fathom Amanda’s motivation until the two of them literally collide in an abandoned orphanage they have both been drawn to for different reasons. Decades before, when his father was imprisoned for murder, this was Will’s home. It appears that the case that launched Amanda’s career forty years ago has suddenly come back to life—and it involves the long-held mystery of Will’s birth and parentage. Now these two dauntless investigators will each need to face down demons from the past if they are to prevent an even greater terror from being unleashed.

Karin Slaughter has sold more than 30 million copies of her books, is published in 32 languages and regularly tops the best-selling lists in numerous countries. Criminal is part of the Will Trent series which takes place in Atlanta and features GBI special agent Will Trent, his partner Faith Mitchell and Angie Polaski.