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.
