What languages does Berlin write in? Notable Berlin writers who do not write in German are presented in conversation, reading and translation.
For the collaboration with English Theatre Berlin | International Performing Arts Center, the evening features Dario Deserri (Italy / Berlin) and his translator Anna Giannessi as well as Rasha Abbas (Syria / Berlin) and their German editor Nikola Richter, hosted by Martin Jankowski.
Adam Johnson is the Phil and Penny Knight Professor in Creative Writing at Stanford University. Winner of a Whiting Award and Fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the American Academy in Berlin, he is the author of several books, including Fortune Smiles, which won the 2015 National Book Award, and the novel The Orphan Master’s Son, which was awarded the 2013 Pulitzer Prize. His fiction has appeared in Esquire, GQ, Playboy, Harper’s Magazine, Granta, Tin House and The Best American Short Stories. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages. Adam Johnson is currently the Holtzbrinck Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin.
Molly Antopol’s debut story collection, The UnAmericans, won the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award, a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Award, the French-American Prize, the Ribalow Prize and a California Book Award Silver Medal. The book was longlisted for the 2014 National Book Award and was a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, the Barnes & Noble Discover Award, the National Jewish Book Award and the Sami Rohr Prize, among others. The book appeared on over a dozen “Best of 2014” lists. The German translation Die Unamerikanischen came out in 2015. Her writing has appeared widely, including in the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Republic, San Francisco Chronicle, NPR’s All Things Considered and This American Life, online at The New Yorker and in the O.Henry Prize anthology. She’s the recipient of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University, where she teaches creative writing and was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard.
Paul La Farge, 2016/2017 Picador Guest Professor for Literature at the University of Leipzig, reads from his new novel The Night Ocean
The novel is about a man who becomes obsessed with an episode from the life of legendary horror author H.P. Lovecraft and then suddenly disappears. His wife then sets off on a desperate search for him.
Paul La Farge was born in 1970 in New York City and studied at Yale University. He has taught creative writing on and off since 2002 at Wesleyan University and Colombia University. He is a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship and was a fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library in 2013-14. His short stories and non-fiction pieces have been widely published in journals, including McSweeney’s, Harper’s Magazine, Fence, Conjunctions, The Believer, Playboy and Cabinet. He is the author of the novels The Artist of the Missing (1999) and Haussmann, or the Distinction (2001), for which he received the annual Bard Fiction Prize. His latest novel Luminous Airplanes was published in 2011.
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.
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)
To 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.
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.
THE US EMBASSY LITERATURE SERIES:
Anthony Marra reads from The Tsar of Love and Techno: Stories (2015)
Anthoyn 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.
Tom Leveen reads from his young adult novel Random (Ich hätte es wissen sollen, Hanser Verlag)
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.
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.