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.
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“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.”
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Booklist (starred review)