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All Tomorrow's Parties: A Memoir
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Grove Atlantic 2016
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“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.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review
 
Rob Spillman—the award-winning, charismatic cofounding editor of the legendary Tin House magazine—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, the writer Elissa Schappell, 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.
 
“With wry humor and wonder, Spillman beautifully captures the deadpan hedonism of the East Berliners and the city’s sense of infinite possibility.” —The New York Times Book Review
 
“A thrilling portrait of the artist as intrepid young adventure seeker.” —Vanity Fair
 
“Convivial, page-turning . . . Spillman’s life is a good one to read.” —The Washington Post
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Format:
Adobe EPUB eBook, Kindle Book, OverDrive Read
Street Date:
04/05/2016
Language:
English
ISBN:
9780802190406
ASIN:
B01AGZ8M4O
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Citations
APA Citation (style guide)

Rob Spillman. (2016). All Tomorrow's Parties: A Memoir. Grove Atlantic.

Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation (style guide)

Rob Spillman. 2016. All Tomorrow's Parties: A Memoir. Grove Atlantic.

Chicago / Turabian - Humanities Citation (style guide)

Rob Spillman, All Tomorrow's Parties: A Memoir. Grove Atlantic, 2016.

MLA Citation (style guide)

Rob Spillman. All Tomorrow's Parties: A Memoir. Grove Atlantic, 2016.

Note! Citation formats are based on standards as of July 2022. Citations contain only title, author, edition, publisher, and year published. Citations should be used as a guideline and should be double checked for accuracy.
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      • bioText: Praise for All Tomorrow's Parties"With wry humor and wonder, Spillman beautifully captures the deadpan hedonism of the East Berliners and the city's sense of infinite possibility, which, to his frustration, never quite imbues him with his own artistic compulsion. (One is reminded as much of Cyril Connolly's anti-bildingsroman 'Enemies of Promise' as Nick Hornby's culture besotted 'High Fidelity.')" —New York Times Book Review"A thrilling portrait of the artist as intrepid young adventure seeker." —Vanity Fair"Convivial, page-turning . . . Spillman's life is a good one to read." —Washington Post"Truly exceptional memoirs have to do something more than recount a good origin story: they have to test the author's youthful understanding of the world, and break down that world, even as it's being built upon the page. All Tomorrow's Parties is such a memoir. Not only is it a super-fun, shatter-the-mirror joyride through Spillman's eccentric upbringing, but it's also replete with insightful double visions . . . [Spillman] manages to invoke both the dreamy, mythic version of life amid art and interesting scenery, and all the chaos and cracks and potential car crashes that threaten it . . . A thrill to read." —Interview Magazine"Compelling . . . [with] captivating journeys of self-discovery . . . [this] memoir says exactly the right things in the most engaging way." —Minneapolis Star Tribune"[A] meditation on place and placelessness, and the thrilling, dangerous, necessary place that both art and the artist occupy in the world." —NPR.org"An artful and irreverent memoir . . . Spillman shares an unusual immigrant story—of a white boy born to American parents; an unusual German story—not of the Holocaust, but of the Cold War; and an unusual love story that takes driving (and running) across a continent to find its way back home. These pages are proof that Spillman has filled his father's footsteps to live for art." —Brooklyn Rail"Spillman is happiest when he is betwixt and between—on the road, crossing borders, running long distances. This is a realm he knows intimately and documents beautifully in All Tomorrow's Parties, a yearning, restless memoir about a lost boy looking for home." —Los Angeles Review of Books"A culturally saturated, Technicolor account of the author's unusual upbringing and the intentional adventures of his young adulthood . . . It is a shrine filled with relics for the people and the art he loves. It quivers with the type of honesty it takes to admit your deepest, most damning secrets. But Spillman isn't angling for sympathy. Instead he is bold and almost defiant. All Tomorrow's Parties is a major achievement and a reflection of the epigraph for chapter 59, which is a Denis Johnson quote: 'Write naked. Write from exile. Write in blood.'" —The Rumpus"Wondrous . . . every page [is] an ecstatic celebration of this thing called life in all of its weird and short glory." —Vol. 1 Brooklyn"Engrossing. . . . provides a fine and stark description of lives lived in the shadows of Glasnost, perestroika and the disintegration of the Soviet Union." —Winnipeg Free Press"Revealing and energetic . . . a captivating story of both personal awakening and cultural upheaval." —Bookreporter"A captivating coming-of-age story and snapshot of a city in flux." —Toronto Star METRO"In this carefully wrought coming-of-age memoir, a young American writer searches for home in an unlikely place: Eaast Berlin immediately after the fall of the wall. . . . His is a quest of roots and writerly authenticity—and his evocation of East Berlin's days is exquisite and revealing." —Publishers Weekly (star...
      • name: Rob Spillman
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title
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fullDescription
“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.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review
 
Rob Spillman—the award-winning, charismatic cofounding editor of the legendary Tin House magazine—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, the writer Elissa Schappell, 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.
 
“With wry humor and wonder, Spillman beautifully captures the deadpan hedonism of the East Berliners and the city’s sense of infinite possibility.” —The New York Times Book Review
 
“A thrilling portrait of the artist as intrepid young adventure seeker.” —Vanity Fair
 
“Convivial, page-turning . . . Spillman’s life is a good one to read.” —The Washington Post
reviews
      • premium: False
      • source: New York Times Book Review
      • content: “With wry humor and wonder, Spillman beautifully captures the deadpan hedonism of the East Berliners and the city's sense of infinite possibility, which, to his frustration, never quite imbues him with his own artistic compulsion. (One is reminded as much of Cyril Connolly's anti-bildingsroman 'Enemies of Promise' as Nick Hornby's culture besotted 'High Fidelity.')"
      • premium: False
      • source: Vanity Fair
      • content: “A thrilling portrait of the artist as intrepid young adventure seeker."
      • premium: False
      • source: Washington Post
      • content: “Convivial, page-turning . . . Spillman's life is a good one to read."
      • premium: False
      • source: Interview Magazine
      • content: “Truly exceptional memoirs have to do something more than recount a good origin story: they have to test the author's youthful understanding of the world, and break down that world, even as it's being built upon the page. All Tomorrow's Parties is such a memoir. Not only is it a super-fun, shatter-the-mirror joyride through Spillman's eccentric upbringing, but it's also replete with insightful double visions . . . [Spillman] manages to invoke both the dreamy, mythic version of life amid art and interesting scenery, and all the chaos and cracks and potential car crashes that threaten it . . . A thrill to read."
      • premium: False
      • source: Minneapolis Star Tribune
      • content: "Compelling . . . [with] captivating journeys of self-discovery . . . [this] memoir says exactly the right things in the most engaging way."
      • premium: False
      • source: NPR.org
      • content: “[A] meditation on place and placelessness, and the thrilling, dangerous, necessary place that both art and the artist occupy in the world."
      • premium: False
      • source: Brooklyn Rail
      • content: "An artful and irreverent memoir . . . Spillman shares an unusual immigrant story--of a white boy born to American parents; an unusual German story--not of the Holocaust, but of the Cold War; and an unusual love story that takes driving (and running) across a continent to find its way back home. These pages are proof that Spillman has filled his father's footsteps to live for art."
      • premium: False
      • source: Los Angeles Review of Books
      • content: "Spillman is happiest when he is betwixt and between--on the road, crossing borders, running long distances. This is a realm he knows intimately and documents beautifully in All Tomorrow's Parties, a yearning, restless memoir about a lost boy looking for home."
      • premium: False
      • source: The Rumpus
      • content: "A culturally saturated, Technicolor account of the author's unusual upbringing and the intentional adventures of his young adulthood . . . It is a shrine filled with relics for the people and the art he loves. It quivers with the type of honesty it takes to admit your deepest, most damning secrets. But Spillman isn't angling for sympathy. Instead he is bold and almost defiant. All Tomorrow's Parties is a major achievement and a reflection of the epigraph for chapter 59, which is a Denis Johnson quote: 'Write naked. Write from exile. Write in blood.'"
      • premium: False
      • source: Vol. 1 Brooklyn
      • content: “Wondrous . . . every page [is] an ecstatic celebration of this thing called life in all of its weird and short glory."
      • premium: False
      • source: Winnipeg Free Press
      • content: “Engrossing. . . . provides a fine and stark description of lives lived in the shadows of Glasnost, perestroika and the disintegration of the Soviet Union."
      • premium: False
      • source: Bookreporter
      • content: “Revealing and energetic . . . a captivating story of both personal awakening and cultural upheaval."
      • premium: False
      • source: Toronto Star METRO
      • content: "A captivating coming-of-age story and snapshot of a city in flux."
      • premium: False
      • source: Publishers Weekly (starred review)
      • content: “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. . . . His is a quest of roots and writerly authenticity--and his evocation of East Berlin's days is exquisite and revealing."
      • premium: False
      • source: Booklist (starred review)
      • content: “Lifelong exposure to passionate artists may have fueled [Spillman's] 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."
      • premium: False
      • source: Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
      • content: “[A] lively debut. . . . Musically and culturally astute, this well-structured book is a delightful coming-of-age story couched within a travel narrative that deftly evokes one of the major historical moments of the 20th century. A richly detailed and always...
      • premium: True
      • source: Publisher's Weekly
      • content:

        Starred review from February 1, 2016
        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. Tin House editor Spillman, who spent his first eight years in West Berlin, recounts his 1990 return with his wife, the writer Elissa Schappell, seeking the heady air of East Berlin, where skinheads battle anarchists while talk of radical art and politics fills the seedy bars and underground raves. As their money dwindles, Schappell’s enthusiasm for the melodramatic atmosphere and their threadbare squat wanes, and she pulls away from Spillman’s literary romanticism. Interspersed are scenes from Spillman’s youth, as he bounces between his divorced American parents, weathers his father’s struggle with his own homosexuality, sings in opera productions at music festivals, disdains his schoolmates, and longs for a life that matches his nonconformist self-image. Spillman describes a hilarious attempt to get a Communist laundry to wash his clothes, which requires negotiations, inspections, and an eight-day wait. Ultimately, his is a quest of roots and writerly authenticity—and his evocation of East Berlin’s last days is exquisite and revealing.

      • premium: True
      • source: Kirkus
      • content:

        Starred review from January 15, 2016
        The lively debut memoir by a Tin House magazine co-founding editor about growing up in West Berlin then returning as an adult to post-Soviet-era East Berlin to find artistic purpose. In 1964, Spillman's parents went to Berlin on Fulbright scholarships to study music. When they separated a few years later, they decided that their small son would live with his closeted gay father. Surrounded by reminders of the Cold War--such as the Berlin Wall and a "giant U.S. Army base"--Spillman became immersed in a colorfully creative world of artists who hailed from all over the world. He and his father left only after the latter accepted a teaching position at the Eastman School of Music in New York. A perpetual outsider who felt at home nowhere, Spillman "read...to escape...but also to find myself," especially after he went to live with his mother in Baltimore. During this period, the author also took up running and experimented with drugs. On the way to figuring out that he wanted to write, Spillman failed out of college once before finishing and survived three major car crashes. In New York City, he met his future wife, Elissa, and embarked on Kerouac-esque travel adventures in the U.S., Portugal, and then the former East Berlin, which had become a "petri dish of creation and foment, a rubble field in which to create a new life with the woman I loved." Yet for all its familiarity, flaws, and youthful energy, the city never completely felt like home to Spillman, who decided to stop running away from himself and his life only after a brush with near tragedy. Musically and culturally astute, this well-structured book is a delightful coming-of-age story couched within a travel narrative that deftly evokes one of the major historical moments of the 20th century. A richly detailed and always engaging memoir on artistic discovery.

        COPYRIGHT(2016) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

      • premium: True
      • source: Booklist
      • content:

        Starred review from March 15, 2016
        A makeshift rave in an abandoned subway station under the Berlin Wall seemed unimaginable, until it wasn't. So begins Spillman's memoir. Cofounders of the literary magazine, Tin House, Spillman and his wife, Elissa Schappell (Blueprints for Building Better Girls, 2011), are living in East Berlin after the fall of Soviet control and before reunification with the West. It's a no-man's land in time and space. Anarchy reigns, but so does the magnetic force drawing Spillman back to the city of his childhood. Chapters effectively alternate between vignettes of his childhood with musician parents and his adult journey back to home. 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. He survives multiple car crashes, detailed with morbid detachment, and other teen indiscretions while learning essential truths about his parents that change the way he thinks about himself. This is the story of formative years spent struggling to fully embrace life at the crossroads of history, art, home, and family.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)

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“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.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review
 
Rob Spillman—the award-winning, charismatic cofounding editor of the legendary Tin House magazine—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....
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