Synopses & Reviews
Rob Spillman, the award-winning, charismatic cofounding editor of Tin House, has devoted his life to the rebellious pursuit of artistic authenticity. In All Tomorrow's Parties, he takes us on a journey through the formative years of his youth in search of purpose through Cold War to post-Wall Berlin and the gritty days of New York City's East Village in the eighties.
Born in Germany to two driven musicians, his childhood was spent backstage 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. It was against this distinctive backdrop that he became inspired to live for art.
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 bullet-pocked, anarchic streets of East Berlin in search of the bohemian lifestyle of their idols. But Spillman's constant striving for inspiration and for identity ultimately led him to discover that he was chasing the one thing that had always eluded him: a place, or person, to call home.
All Tomorrow s Parties is an intimate, exhilarating, and heartfelt memoir; a colorful, music-filled coming-of-age portrait of an artist s life and an offbeat exploration of a shifting Berlin on the cusp of cultural renaissance.
Review
"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
Review
"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
Review
"[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
engaging memoir on artistic discovery." Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)
Review
"Part survivor’s manual, part travelogue, part cultural history, it’s a story of an arts-mad, idealistic, brave young man struggling to make his way — and find a place in the world... Spillman unspools a story that will resonate with everyone who‘s ever searched for home." Michael Hainey, author of After Visiting Friends
Synopsis
Rob Spillman, the award-winning, charismatic cofounding editor of
Tin House, has devoted his life to the rebellious pursuit of artistic authenticity. In
All Tomorrow's Parties, he takes us on a journey through the formative years of his youth in search of purpose--through Cold War to post-Wall Berlin and the gritty days of New York City's East Village in the eighties.
Born in Germany to two driven musicians, his childhood was spent backstage 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. It was against this distinctive backdrop that he became inspired to live for art.
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 bullet-pocked, anarchic streets of East Berlin in search of the bohemian lifestyle of their idols. But Spillman's constant striving--for inspiration and for identity--ultimately led him to discover that he was chasing the one thing that had always eluded him: a place, or person, to call home.
All Tomorrow's Parties is an intimate, exhilarating, and heartfelt memoir; a colorful, music-filled coming-of-age portrait of an artist's life and an offbeat exploration of a shifting Berlin on the cusp of cultural renaissance.
About the Author
Rob Spillman is editor of Tin House magazine and editorial adviser for Tin House Books, and was recently awarded the PEN/Nora Magid Award for Editing. His writing has appeared in Boston Review, GQ, the New York Times Book Review, Rolling Stone, Sports Illustrated, Vogue, and Worth, among others. He was previously the monthly book columnist for Details magazine and is a contributor of book reviews and essays to Salon and Bookforum. He has also worked for Random House, Vanity Fair, and the New Yorker. He is currently a lecturer in Columbia University's MFA graduate writing program.