The U.S. Embassy Literature Series
- September 11: Tom Drury
- October 24: Colson Whitehead
- November 6: John Chatterton Williams
- November 21: Ariel Levy
Monday, September 11, 2017, 20:00 at the English Theatre Berlin
Tom Drury
Grouse County (Klett-Cotta 2017)
Translated as one book from The End of Vandalism, Hunts In Dreams and Pacific (Houghton Mifflin und Grove Atlantic, New York)
Moderated by R. Jay Magill, Writer, and Editor, Berlin Journal & Web, American Academy in Berlin
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 was the Mary Ellen von der Heyden Fellow at the American Academy Berlin in 2015 and Picador Guest Professor at Leipzig University in the spring term 2017.
In cooperation with English Theatre Berlin | International Performing Arts Center, the American Academy Berlin and Klett-Cotta
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Tuesday, October 24, 20:00 at the Literarische Colloquium Berlin
Colson Whitehead
Underground Railroad (Penguin Random House 2016; Hanser 2017)
Colson Whitehead is the New York Times bestselling author of The Noble Hustle,Zone One, Sag Harbor, The Intuitionist, John Henry Days, Apex Hides the Hurt, and one collection of essays, The Colossus of New York. For Underground Railroad, Whitehead received the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and the Carnegie Medal for Fiction. It was a #1 New York Times Bestseller. A recipient of MacArthur and Guggenheim fellowships, he lives in New York City.
Literarisches Colloquium Berlin (LCB), Am Sandwerder 5, 14109 Berlin
Tickets: 8 € / 5 € at LCB
School groups free if they register with IRCBerlin@state.gov
. . . a magnificent tour de force chronicling a young slave’s adventures as she makes a desperate bid for freedom in the antebellum South.
Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. Life is hell for all the slaves, but especially bad for Cora; an outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is coming into womanhood—where even greater pain awaits. When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a terrifying risk and escape. Matters do not go as planned—Cora kills a young white boy who tries to capture her. Though they manage to find a station and head north, they are being hunted.
In Whitehead’s ingenious conception, the Underground Railroad is no mere metaphor—engineers and conductors operate a secret network of tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil. Cora and Caesar’s first stop is South Carolina, in a city that initially seems like a haven. But the city’s placid surface masks an insidious scheme designed for its black denizens. And even worse: Ridgeway, the relentless slave catcher, is close on their heels. Forced to flee again, Cora embarks on a harrowing flight, state by state, seeking true freedom. http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com
In cooperation with Hanser Verlag and LCB
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Monday, November 6, 2017, 20:00 at the English Theatre
John Chatterton Williams
Race, Identity, and the Boundaries of Blackness
John Chatterton Williams explores what it means to be a black man of mixed-race heritage with a white-looking daughter and a white wife.
A reading and conversation with Rose-Anne Clermont, Journalist and Author of Bush Girl.
Thomas Chatterton Williams holds a B.A. in philosophy from Georgetown University and a master’s degree from the Cultural Reporting and Criticism program at New York University. While a student at NYU, his op-ed piece, “Yes, Blame Hip-Hop,” struck a deep nerve when it ran in the Washington Post, generating a record-breaking number of comments.
English Theatre Berlin, Fidicinstr. 40, 10965 Berlin
Admission: 8 Euro/ school groups free if they register with IRCBerlin@state.gov
Book tickets: +49 – (0)30 – 691 12 11; by e-mail at tickets@etberlin.de
Sold out!
In cooperation with the American Academy Berlin and the English Theatre Berlin | International Performing Arts Center
Tuesday, November 21, 20:00 at the English Theatre Berlin
Ariel Levy
The Rules Do Not Apply (Penguin Random House 2017; dt. Gegen alle Regeln, Knaur 2017)
Ariel Levy joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 2008, and received the National Magazine Award for Essays and Criticism in 2014 for her piece “Thanksgiving in Mongolia.” She is the author of the book Female Chauvinist Pigs and was a contributing editor at New York for twelve years.
English Theatre Berlin, Fidicinstr. 40, 10965 Berlin
Admission: 8 Euro/ school groups free if they register with IRCBerlin@state.gov
Book tickets: +49 – (0)30 – 691 12 11; by e-mail at tickets@etberlin.de
When Ariel Levy left for a reporting trip to Mongolia in 2012, she was pregnant, married, financially secure, and successful on her own terms. A month later, none of that was true.
Levy picks you up and hurls you through the story of how she built an unconventional life and then watched it fall apart with astonishing speed. Like much of her generation, she was raised to resist traditional rules—about work, about love, and about womanhood.
In this “deeply human and deeply moving” (The New York Times Book Review) memoir, Levy chronicles the adventure and heartbreak of being, in her own words, “a woman who is free to do whatever she chooses.” Her story of resilience becomes an unforgettable portrait of the shifting forces in our culture, of what has changed—and of what is eternal.
In cooperation with English Theatre Berlin | International Performing Arts Center and Knaur
Mit Ende 30 verliert Ariel Levy ihr Kind, ihre große Liebe und die Gewissheit, ihr Leben im Griff zu haben. Sie muss lernen, den Kontrollverlust zu akzeptieren – und schreibt ein Buch über ihre Geschichte, die für eine Generation steht, die glaubt, alles planen zu können.
