etb English
Theatre
Berlin International Performing Arts Center

THE U.S. EMBASSY LITERATURE SERIES:
Amy Bloom reads from her novel Lucky Us (Wir Glücklichen | Hoffmann und Campe)
“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.

Amy 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

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)

Set 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

Tom 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.

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

Chris 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