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Berlin International Performing Arts Center

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

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

In “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.

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

Will 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.

THE US EMBASSY LITERATURE SERIES:
Ruth Ozeki reads from her novel A Tale for the Time Being (Geschichte für einen Augenblick – S.Fischer-Verlag, 2014)

Ruth discovers a Hello Kitty lunchbox washed up on the shore of her beach home. Within it lies a diary that expresses the hopes and dreams of a young girl. She suspects it might have arrived on a drift of debris from the 2011 tsunami. With every turn of the page, she is sucked deeper into an enchanting mystery.
In a small cafe in Tokyo, 16-year-old Nao Yasutani is navigating the challenges thrown up by modern life. In the face of cyberbullying, the mysteries of a 104-year-old Buddhist nun and great-grandmother, and the joy and heartbreak of family, Nao is trying to find her own place – and voice – through a diary she hopes will find a reader and friend who finally understands her.

Ruth Ozeki was born and raised in New Haven, Connecticut, by an American father and a Japanese mother. She studied English and Asian Studies at Smith College. In June 2010 she was ordained as a Zen Buddhist priest. She divides her time between British Columbia and New York. She is the author of three novels: My Year of Meats (1998), which won the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Award, the Imus/Barnes and Noble American Book Award, and a Special Jury Prize of the World Cookbook Awards in Versailles; All Over Creation (2002), the recipient of a 2004 American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation, as well as the Willa Literary Award for Contemporary Fiction; and A Tale for the Time Being (2013), longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2013.

Photo Ruth Ozeki: Ross Land

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