Michael Moorcock and Alan Moore, courtesy of Mark von Schlegell.

Contemporary writer  Mark von Schlegell is a dual Irish and American citizen. He was born in New York and lives in Cologne, Germany. He is the author of the novels Venusia (2005) and Mercury Station (2009) published by M.I.T./Semiotext(e). Venusia was honor’s listed for the 2007 James Tiptree, Jr. Prize in science fiction. His experimental fiction and cultural criticism appear regularly in the international art community. Realometer (2009), a collection of literary essays on Poe, Melville and James Tiptree, Jr. is available from Merve Verlag, Berlin in German.

photo courtesy of Chris Harvey

Chris Harvey spent 2008-2009 in Berlin on a Fulbright fellowship for fiction writing. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Third Coast, Fourteen Hills, the San Francisco Weekly, and other publications.

photo courtesy of thinknowyes.com

Stefan Sirucek is a freelance journalist and writer who can generally be found somewhere between Boston and Berlin.  He is a regular contributor of news and opinion pieces to the Huffington Post.

photo courtesy of wf-foto-aktuell.de

Ralph Martin is a writer and journalist who has lived in Berlin since 2003. His book EIN AMERIKANER IN BERLIN: WIE EIN NEW YORKER LERNTE, DIE DEUTSCHEN ZU LIEBEN, was published at the end of 2009 by Dumont Verlag. His forthcoming book about fatherhood in contemporary Germany, LULU UND ICH, will appear in Autumn 2010 from Piper Verlag. He has written about Berlin in the New York Times and Travel & Leisure and has written extensively for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

Read more at his website: ralphmartinwrites.com

Image Gold as Power, East Berlin by Markus Bachmann

Ari Gold’s first feature film “Adventures of Power,” an epic comedy about the American dream and air-drumming, won best-of-festival prizes at 8 film festivals, and is currently in limited release in the U.S..  Ari was named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s “25 Faces to Watch” after having an unprecedented three short films in a row at Sundance.  He won a Student Academy Award for “Helicopter,” an autobiographical retelling of the aftermath of his mother’s death, which was called “the best short film of the year” by Film Threat, and won top prizes at short-film festivals in the US, France, Germany and Brazil. His previous short film “Culture” which he directed and starred in, was written up in the New York Times after its Sundance premiere, and became the inspiration for a filmmaking collective in the former Yugoslavia, which he later joined.

As an actor, Ari won “Stoner of the Year” from High Times Magazine for his performance in the Sony Classics release “Groove.”  He was raised in San Francisco, and has lived at various times in New York, Los Angeles, New Mexico, Montana, Germany and Serbia.  Ari sings in the bands The Honey Brothers (with Adrian Grenier) and Gold Brothers (with his twin brother Ethan) and plays ukulele, piano and sometimes drums.

JOIN MAILING LIST & WATCH TRAILER: http://AdventuresOfPower.com
HOME SITE: http://AriGoldFilms.com
BAND: http://TheHoneyBrothers.com

All new pieces from Berlin Stories coming up on NPR in January. In the meantime, please read Vogue Magazine’s Letter from Berlin, a beautiful description of the state of things now, 20 years after the fall of the wall. The piece also mentions our series and includes a great literary reading list about the city!

Born in Southern California’s Mojave desert in the late 60s, writer/editor Kimberly Bradley’s base has moved steadily eastward. After graduating from Middlebury College in 1990, she ventured to Hamburg, Germany, where she inadvertently found herself in a divided country attempting to put itself back together. Now based in Berlin, Bradley writes about art, design, architecture and travel for such publications as The New York Times, Metropolis, Artnet.com and Frame. She is also a frequent contributor to monographs and art catalogs as a translator or writer.

Photo by Paul

Siri Hustvedt is the author of four novels, The Blindfold, The Enchantment of Lily Dahl, What I Loved, and The Sorrows of an American, as well as two books of essays, A Plea for Eros, and Mysteries of the Rectangle: Essays on Painting.

R. Jay Magill Jr. is a writer and illustrator whose work has appeared in the New York Times, International Herald Tribune, Wall Street Journal, Atlantic Monthly, American Prospect, American Interest, Foreign Policy, The Believer, and Spiegel On-line, among others. He is the author of Chic Ironic Bitterness (Michigan, 2007), recipient of an Eric Hoffer Notable Book in Culture award. Magill holds a PhD in American Studies from the University of Hamburg and lives in Berlin, where he works for the American Academy.

Illustration above also by R. Jay Magill

This is the first in a series of readings, by the actor Harvey Friedman, of passages taken from novels that explore eras of Berlin past.

First published in Germany in 1947 and finally translated into English in 2009, Every Man Dies Alone is a true masterpiece from a bestselling writer who saw his life crumble following his decision not to flee Germany and his refusal to join the Nazi party. The novel presents a richly detailed portrait of life in Berlin under the Nazis and tells the sweeping saga of one working-class couple’s decision to take a stand when their only son is killed at the front. With nothing but their grief and each other against the awesome power of the Reich, Otto and Anna Quangel launch a simple, clandestine resistance campaign that soon has an enraged Gestapo on their trail and a world of terrified neighbors and cynical snitches ready to turn them in. A deeply stirring story of two people standing up for what’s right and for each other.

For more information about this novel and its author please go to the website of Melville House Publishing.