etb English
Theatre
Berlin International Performing Arts Center

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

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

THE US EMBASSY LITERATURE SERIES:
Jennine Capó Crucet reads from her novel-in-progress Magic City Relic.

Jennine Capó Crucet will be the Picador Guest Professor for Literature at Leipzig University in the fall of 2013, a program initiated by the University of Leipzig in cooperation with the German Academic Exchange Service and the Veranstaltungsforum der Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck in 2007.

Jennine is the author of How to Leave Hialeah, which won the Iowa Short Fiction Prize, the John Gardner Book Award, the Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award, and was named a Best Book of the Year by the Miami Herald, the Miami New Times, and the Latinidad List. The title story from the collection won a PEN/O. Henry Prize and appears in the 2011 PEN/O. Henry Prize Anthology. Originally from Miami, she is currently an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Florida State University.

Jennine is the recipient of the John Winthrop Prize & Residency for Emerging Writers, the Emily Clark Balch Fiction Prize, and her work has been a finalist for both the Chicano/Latino Literary Prize and the Missouri Review Editor’s Prize. Her stories have appeared in numerous magazines. Her book reviews appear in the L Magazine, a New York City bi-weekly.

Pic: Andre Vippolos

Donald Ray Pollock reads from Knockemstiff.

Spanning a period from the midsixties to the late nineties, the stories in Knockemstiff feature a cast of recurring characters who are woebegone, baffled and depraved – but irresistibly, undeniably real. Rendered in the American vernacular with vivid imagery and a wry, dark sense of humor, these thwarted and sometimes violent lives jump off the page at the reader with inexorable force. … Donald Ray Pollock presents his characters and the sordid goings-on with a stern intelligence and a bracing absence of value judgments. … Knockemstiff is a genuine entry into the literature of place.

Pollock’s voice is fresh and full-throated, and while these stories travel negligible distances, even from one another, the best of them leave an indelible smear The New York Times – Halb Americana-Kunstwerk, halb evangelikale Exploitation. … Wo immer gebetet wird in Pollocks Hardboiled-Krimi – es breitet sich ein Atem der Fäulnis aus. … Pollock erweist sich mit diesem Roman als Logiker des Wahns. Der Spiegel  –  Hier ist sie, die perfekte amerikanische Kurzgeschichte: Donald Ray Pollocks Erzählzyklus Knockemstiff haut einen glatt aus den Schuhen. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

Donald Ray Pollock is an American writer. Born in 1954 and raised in Knockemstiff, Ohio, Pollock has lived his entire adult life in Chillicothe, Ohio, where he worked at the Mead Paper Mill as a laborer and truck driver until age 50, when he enrolled in the English program at Ohio State University. While there, Doubleday published his debut short story collection, Knockemstiff, and the New York Times regularly posted his election dispatches from southern Ohio throughout the 2008 campaign. The Devil All the Time, his first novel, was published in 2011. His work has appeared in various literary journals; he received numerous awards including the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Knockemstiff and the Grand Prix de Litterature Policiere for The Devil All the Time.

Photo: Jean Luc Bertini

THE US EMBASSY LITERATURE SERIES

Dina Nayeri reads from her novel A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea (Ein Teelöffel Land und Meer, mare-Verlag)

Growing up in a small rice-farming village in 1980s Iran, 11-year-old Saba Hafezi and her twin sister Mahtab are captivated by America. They keep lists of English words and collect illegal Life magazines, television shows, and rock music. So when her mother and sister disappear, leaving Saba and her father alone in Iran, Saba is certain that they have moved to America without her. But her parents have taught her that “all fate is written in the blood,” and that twins will live the same life, even if separated by land and sea. As she grows up in the warmth and community of her local village, falls in and out of love, and struggles with the limited possibilities in post-revolutionary Iran, Saba envisions that  there is another way for her story to go. Somewhere, it must be that her sister is living the Western version of this life. And where Saba’s story has all the grit and brutality of real life under the new Islamic regime, her sister’s life gives her a freedom and control that Saba can only dream of.

Dina Nayeri was born in the middle of the revolution in Iran and moved to Oklahoma at ten-years-old. Her debut novel, A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea, was published in 2013 and translated into 13 foreign languages. Her work is published or scheduled for publication in over 20 countries and has appeared in numerous magazines like Granta New Voices or The Southern Review. Dina Nayeri holds both an MBA and a Master of Education from Harvard, and a BA from Princeton.  Now she  is at work on her second novel, also about an Iranian family,  at the Iowa Writers Workshop where she is a Truman Capote Fellow and Teaching Writing Fellow.