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The Age of Migration, a new story collection by Kai Maristed, has won the 2024 inaugural Kevin McIlvoy Book Prize, with publication by WTAW books.https://www.wtawpress.org/kevin-mcilvoy-book-prize.
Notice of exact pub date, readings, and merch sale of worn-out flipflops to come.
Excerpts from the judges' remarks:
"The Age of Migration is worldly in all senses. These are remarkable stories, full of beautiful urgencies, with indelible characters who get themselves in trouble all over the globe. A terrific book."
—Joan Silber, author of Secrets of Happiness and Improvement
"people... yearning to comprehend their place in the world fully. Kai Maristed evokes the universal and the unique in characters who are traveling unknown territories, both geographically and personally. These stories are full of discoveries, a book meant for the explorer in all of us mapping the familiar in new ways."
—Nina McConigley, author of Cowboys and East Indians, winner of the PEN Open Book Award
"In this remarkably wide-ranging collection, Kai Maristed demonstrates a masterful ability to imagine her way into the lives of others and—even more impressive—connect them to ours."
—Peter Turchi, author of Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer
READ the short story 'The Age of Migration', in Ploughshares.
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/746489/pdf
RECOMMENDED: Launching June 6th, https://artsfuse.org/293262/television-review-kafka-a-gripping-biopic-of-the-ever-iconic-author/
In December, Kai's essay, 'An Iwo Jima Marine's Excellent Buddhist Funeral,' was nominated by AGNI magazine for a 2024 Pushcart Prize.
In November, On the Seawall published the commissioned Cronica, Bastille Day 2023.
About Broken Ground
"I have read [Broken Ground] with the greatest admiration. It seems to me extraordinary... a significant contribution to the literature of contemporary Germany."
John Coetzee
Hardcover: 320 pages ; Shoemaker & Hoard; (October 2003); ISBN: 1593760051
BOOKLIST Review:
Kaethe Schalk was born out of a love affair between an American soldier turned communist sympathizer and a German refugee. Raised by her grandparents, she eventually reunited with her father, a rising bureaucrat in East Germany, and she, too, joined the cause. Upon her later defection to West Berlin, she married into an old but impoverished aristocratic family. As she observed the turmoil of postwar German partition, the protests of the 1960s, the building of the Berlin wall and its eventual destruction, and German unification, she also attempted to raise a family. Now, living an isolated life on the New England farm of her girlhood, she returns to Berlin to seek her daughter, who has gone missing. While she roams, astonished, through the dark underbelly of a newly whole and prosperous Berlin, she is also haunted by her own history. The prose is stupendous as Maristed's entangled layers of plot allow a look at modern Berlin through the eyes of its turbulent past.
Michael Spinella
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