Cristina Garci a is the author of seven novels, including: Dreaming in Cuban-a Finalist for the National Book Award whose 25th Anniversary edition is coming in March 2017-The Agu ero Sisters, Monkey Hunting, A Handbook to Luck, The Lady Matador's Hotel, and King of Cuba. Garci a has edited two anthologies, Cubani simo: The Vintage Book of Contemporary Cuban Literature and Bordering Fires: The Vintage Book of Contemporary Mexican and Chicano/a Literature. Garci a's work has been translated into fourteen languages. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers' Award, a Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University, and an NEA grant, among others. Garci a has taught at universities nationwide. Recently, she completed her tenure as University Chair in Creative Writing at Texas State University-San Marcos and as Visiting Professor at the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas-Austin. She lives in the San Francisco Bay area.
Praise for Here in Berlin
Long-listed for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence
Long-listed for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award
The New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice
1 of the 10 Best Books of 2017 (BBC Culture)
An ALA Notable Book of 2018
"Here in Berlin is one of the most interesting new works of fiction
I've read . . . The voices are remarkably distinct, and even with
their linguistic mannerisms . . . mark them out as separate people
. . . [This novel] is simply very, very good." -The New York Times
Book Review
"Garcia's new novel is ingeniously structured, veering from
poignant to shocking . . . Here in Berlin has echoes of W.G.
Sebald, but its vivid, surprising images of wartime Berlin are
Garcia's own." -BBC Culture, 1 of the 10 Best Books of 2017
"An exhilarating orchestration of competing voices and
temporalities . . . Here in Berlin is a marvelous palimpsest." -San
Francisco Chronicle
"Here in Berlin is a bold, innovative novel. Garci a gives each
speaker just enough space to illuminate lives and choices that
might seem shocking in the present, but however uncomfortable they
may be, she proves that these stories of war and belief and the
failure of moral clarity are ultimately too important for the
reader to look away." -Dallas Morning News
"The novel is a tapestry of stories, a museum's worth of stories,
of witness bearers, men and women who have lived through a
particular moment in history, and have come out on the other side
with a mouth full of narrative . . . Here in Berlin is unflinching
in its gaze, introducing us to characters with pasts that might
otherwise be buried . . . Though not considered a historical
novelist, generally speaking, Garci a's work often finds itself
playing in the sandbox of history, seeking shapes and patterns in
the swirls of it. Here in Berlin, I would argue, could be the most
important book of 2017, a year that asked so many questions. The
answers, we find, are sometimes behind us." -The Miami Rail
"This exquisite book brings to life the worlds of a number of
characters living in Berlin. Garci a is a talented writer, and she
delivers a thought-provoking and immersive portrait of the city."
-Bustle, 1 of 10 best fiction books coming out in October
"A vivid portrait of a city in flux, Here in Berlin follows an
unnamed visitor as she encounters a host of characters, from a
young Cuban POW and the son of a Berlin zookeeper to a Jewish
scholar who hid in a sarcophagus for 37 days."-PureWow, 1 of 50
Best Books for Fall
"The stories that comprise Here in Berlin are beautifully related
with a perfectly pitched sense of melancholy and pathos, bound into
a delicate yet powerful whole by The Visitor's own struggles to
preserve and renew her sense of self while forming a new
perspective to live by . . . Garci a successfully projects this
truth by grounding extraordinary stories within the fabric of the
everyday, while also defamiliarizing territory we presume to know
well." -Chicago Review of Books
"A compulsively readable, kaleidoscopic novel depicting a
multicultural Berlin in the shadow of World War II, transformed by
history as well as newcomers from Cuba, Angola, and Russia." -The
National Book Review, 1 of 5 Hot Books of the Week
"Here in Berlin is an impeccable linguistic exercise in narratology
and a brilliant exploration of the various identities we adhere to
in metropolitan environments. Garci a successfully rehumanizes a
German postwar trauma of a populace that for so long coped with the
making anonymous of people through genocide, the deadening speed of
its capitalist structures, and the oppressive world of East Berlin.
As for her readers, Garci a adeptly passes them the torch, giving
them a little nook in which they can sit and watch the characters
go about their lives, spectating and writing, in the intransitive,
the city of Berlin." -Los Angeles Review of Books
"A strong achievement of diversity-the gradual painting of a mural
with many masterful brush strokes, and an expert parroting whose
characters' egotism, recriminations, and melancholy all feel
authentic." -Literal Magazine
"Garci a, a transcendentally imaginative, piquantly satiric, and
profoundly compassionate novelist, dramatizes the helter-skelter of
lives ruptured by tyranny, war, and political upheavals with sharp
awareness of unlikely multicultural alliances . . . With echoes of
W. G. Sebald and Gu nter Grass, Garci a has created an intricate,
sensitive, and provocative montage revolving around the question:
'Do people remember only what they can endure, or distort memories
until they can endure them?'" -Booklist (starred review)
"With the vividness-and unreliability-of a fevered hallucination,
[the characters] tell haunting, and occasionally intersecting,
stories that last only a few pages but linger much longer . . . The
novel's many excellent characters and their stories combine to
create a sense of a city where, as an amnesiac photojournalist puts
it, the ghosts 'aren't confined to cemeteries.'" -Publishers Weekly
(starred review)
"Garci a . . . is a skilled writer, crafting a complete story from
the threads of many glimpses. In the assembly of these glimpses,
she has created a vivid portrait of a decimated yet surging Berlin
since World War II, of individuality and humankind, of terror and
resilience. It is beautifully written in a fluent and evocative
prose. It is the story of how people live with their pasts. A
stunning collection of memories, snippets, and specters." -Kirkus
Reviews (starred review)
"A quilt of a novel that creates a hypnotic portrait of the former
East German city during and after World War II . . . A poetic
pastiche of rationalizations and regrets, and a testament to the
challenge of reconciling a difficult past." -BookPage
"A brilliant novel, by turns hilarious and haunting, gorgeous and
brutal, entertaining and profound. Cristina Garci a masterfully
weaves an intricate web of history and passion, finely tuned to the
subtle music of the soul. Here in Berlin demonstrates exactly why
Garci a has so long been an international treasure, one who never
ceases to astonish." -Carolina De Robertis, author of Perla and
Gods of Tango
"Here in Berlin is a dream visit to that City you know. To visit
this City is to be filled with dark surprise and illuminated
insight. It is to be infused with tragic wonder and relentless
hope. Will you get home safely? You will. But you will never be the
same. And that is the power of this novel by master storyteller,
Cristina Garci a. Visitor? No Longer." -Denise Cha vez, author of
The King and Queen of Comezo n
"Here in Berlin is a haunting portrait of place told through the
shifting, kaleidoscopic stories of its people. History's long and
mournful shadow follows us into contemporary lives full of secrets,
regrets, and proud enduring. By the end, we are all sifting through
the rubble of the twentieth century to find shards of our own
buried past." -Ana Menendez, author of In Cuba I Was a German
Shepherd
"A book about endings and new beginnings, of how the past affects
our present, the long shadows still cast by the Second World War,
and how stories enrich the world and make up a city where the
personal and the political are revealed in all their great
complexities. Garci a has written a symphony to what has passed
away and to what remains and endures." -Micheline Aharonian Marcom,
author of A Brief History of Yes
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