All Tomorrow's Parties
A Memoir
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- 13,99 €
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- 13,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
"In this carefully wrought coming-of-age memoir, a young American writer searches for home in an unlikely place: East Berlin immediately after the fall of the wall." —Publishers Weekly, starred review
Rob Spillman—the award-winning, charismatic cofounding editor of the legendary Tin House magazine—has devoted his life to the rebellious pursuit of artistic authenticity. Born in Germany to two driven musicians, his childhood was spent among the West Berlin cognoscenti, in a city two hundred miles behind the Iron Curtain. There, the Berlin Wall stood as a stark reminder of the split between East and West, between suppressed dreams and freedom of expression.
After an unsettled youth moving between divorced parents in disparate cities, Spillman would eventually find his way into the literary world of New York City, only to abandon it to return to Berlin just months after the Wall came down. Twenty-five and newly married, Spillman and his wife, the writer Elissa Schappell, moved to the anarchic streets of East Berlin in search of the bohemian lifestyle of their idols. But Spillman soon discovered he was chasing the one thing that had always eluded him: a place, or person, to call home. In his intimate, entertaining, and heartfelt memoir, Spillman narrates a colorful, music-filled coming-of-age portrait of an artist's life that is also a cultural exploration of a shifting Berlin.
"With wry humor and wonder, Spillman beautifully captures the deadpan hedonism of the East Berliners and the city's sense of infinite possibility." —The New York Times Book Review
"A thrilling portrait of the artist as intrepid young adventure seeker." —Vanity Fair
"Convivial, page-turning . . . Spillman's life is a good one to read." —The Washington Post
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this carefully wrought coming-of-age memoir, a young American writer searches for home in an unlikely place: East Berlin immediately after the fall of the wall. Tin House editor Spillman, who spent his first eight years in West Berlin, recounts his 1990 return with his wife, the writer Elissa Schappell, seeking the heady air of East Berlin, where skinheads battle anarchists while talk of radical art and politics fills the seedy bars and underground raves. As their money dwindles, Schappell's enthusiasm for the melodramatic atmosphere and their threadbare squat wanes, and she pulls away from Spillman's literary romanticism. Interspersed are scenes from Spillman's youth, as he bounces between his divorced American parents, weathers his father's struggle with his own homosexuality, sings in opera productions at music festivals, disdains his schoolmates, and longs for a life that matches his nonconformist self-image. Spillman describes a hilarious attempt to get a Communist laundry to wash his clothes, which requires negotiations, inspections, and an eight-day wait. Ultimately, his is a quest of roots and writerly authenticity and his evocation of East Berlin's last days is exquisite and revealing.
