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“Rob Spillman grew up in Berlin during the Cold War and his stories related to crossing and being near the Wall are chilling and interesting; his constant longing for the home where he grew up is something that is very familiar to me. The contrast between the Berlin of the ’60s when Rob was a child living with his musician dad and the Berlin of 1989, post-Wall but pre-reunification, was gripping stuff.”
— Claire • East City Bookshop
From the award-winning, esteemed cofounding editor of the legendary Tin House magazine, All Tomorrow’s Parties is an intimate, spirited memoir of a rebellious young man’s fierce pursuit of an artistic life and a portrait of a shifting Berlin in the midst of a cultural renaissance.
Rob Spillman 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 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.
Rob Spillman is editor of Tin House magazine and editorial advisor of Tin House Books. He was previously the monthly book columnist for Details magazine and edited Gods and Soldiers: The Penguin Anthology of Contemporary African Writing. He has written for Vogue, GQ, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, the Boston Review, and the New York Times Book Review, among many others. Spillman has also worked for Random House, Vanity Fair, and the New Yorker. He teaches at various MFA programs, including Columbia University’s.
Malcolm Hillgartner is a professional actor, playwright, and songwriter. In 2007, he began recording audiobooks and has since recorded more than 175 titles. He has won multiple Earphones Awards and was named a Best Voice of 2013 by AudioFile magazine.
Reviews
“Spillman unspools a story that will resonate with everyone who’s ever searched for home.”
“Rob Spillman’s story of rarefied opera culture as a child, and East German nightlife an adult, is limpid and lively in its telling, and it covers fascinating ground.”
“If you’ve ever been young, in love, and desperate to live an authentic life, this book is for you—a ravishing memoir about a young man’s quest for art, meaning, and a place to call home.”
“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…Ultimately, his is a quest of roots and writerly authenticity—and his evocation of East Berlin’s last days is exquisite and revealing.”
“Spillman recounts his nomadic youth, shuttling between summers at musical festivals with his father and Baltimore, where he struggles to fit into his mother’s new life. Lifelong exposure to passionate artists may have fueled his creativity, but an existential dread that he won’t find passion in his own life gnaws at him…This is the story of formative years spent struggling to fully embrace life at the crossroads of history, art, home, and family.”
“A delightful coming-of-age story couched within a travel narrative that deftly evokes one of the major historical moments of the twentieth century. A richly detailed and always engaging memoir on artistic discovery.”
“Spillman brilliantly—thrillingly—captures the velocity and the changing sounds of youth as it simultaneously hurls away from, and toward, home.”
“An achingly beautiful and brilliantly structured book.”
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