Dialogue Berlin

The Master and His Emissary — Iain McGilchrist in conversation

‘Few books this year can match The Master and His Emissary in breadth of erudition, scope, and ambition… a highly stimulating read.’ A. C. Grayling

After our Alone in Berlin event at The Direktorenhaus in June, Bookslut.com founder and editor Jessa Crispin returns to talk to Iain McGilchrist . With recent advances in neuro-imaging and research into the human mind, our knowledge about how the brain works is growing in leaps and bounds, a subject addressed in Iain McGilchrist’s book The Master and His Emissary.

McGilchrist examines one of the more startling revelations to come out of recent research: that the two hemispheres of the brain are not co-operative helpmates, both working in the same direction to solve problems. It was long thought that the left side of the brain handled language, and the right brain was the ‘silent half’ that handled creativity and art. In fact, the two hemispheres are closer to bickering roommates, and occasionally they fight dirty. Iain McGilchrist will be talking about what the new neuroscience says about creativity and literature, as well as the future of human evolution.

‘There’s a war going on in your head over everything from what you want to be when you grow up to what you decide to wear in the morning. Come learn about the science behind your troubled mind.’

Thursday 1 July
19:30 – 21:30

The Direktorenhaus
Am Krögel 2
10179 Berlin

Entry €3,00

John Wray

John Wray has been compared to numerous literary heavyweights, from Franz Kafka to J.D. Salinger. His latest title is Lowboy, a compelling, fast-paced literary thriller that follows a schizophrenic 16-year-old — recently escaped from an institution, and off his meds — through the New York subway. Wray’s novel, described by the New York Times as ‘uncompromising, often gripping and generally excellent’, explores the psyche of the paranoid schizophrenic teenager, plunging the reader into an alternative reality, ‘a fun-house mirror, with places and people recognizable but distorted’. Wray’s first novel, The Right Hand of Sleep, won the Whiting Award, and in 2007 Granta picked him out as one of America’s best novelists under 35.

‘Just then the uptown B arrived and saved him. Its ghost blew into the station first, a tunnel-shaped clot of air the exact length of the train behind it, hot from its own great compression and speed, whipping the litter up into a cloud.’

Friday 11 June
19:00 – 21:00
Café Hilde
Metzer Straße 22
10405 Berlin
FREE ENTRY, followed by live music from Antonetteg and Gravid Wives.

Hans Fallada — Alone in Berlin

Previously planned for April, we are happy to announce that Dialogue Berlin’s Hans Fallada event has now been rescheduled for 17 June at Direktorenhaus, the city’s latest multidisciplinary art space. Dialogue Berlin and Bookslut.com collaborate to present an exclusive evening to discuss the life and work of Hans Fallada. The writer lived a life as fascinating as any of the characters in his remarkable novels, of which Alone in Berlin, first published in English in 2009, became a surprise literary hit.

Unlike other prominent writers including Thomas Mann and Herman Hesse, Fallada decided not to leave Germany during World War II, and he was eventually institutionalised in a hospital for the criminally insane after refusing to join the Nazi Party. The Gestapo ordered him to write a work of anti-Semitic propaganda, but instead, while in hospital, he wrote his masterpiece The Drinker, using a dense code that was not fully deciphered until after his death.

Fallada managed to outlive his captors by convincing them he was working on his assignment, but after the war he descended into alcohol and morphine addiction. It was during this time that a friend presented him with the Gestapo file of a couple arrested for distributing anti-Nazi propaganda across Berlin during the war.

That couple’s story is retold in Alone in Berlin, a recently rediscovered classic of German literature, and the work that Primo Levi called ‘the greatest book ever written about German resistance to the Nazis’. Fallada died before the book saw publication.

Ulrich Ditzen, Fallada’s son — who was 16 when his father died — will be discussing his father’s life and work with Jessa Crispin, editor of Bookslut.com.

Thursday 17 June
19:30 – 21:30
The Direktorenhaus
Am Krögel 2
10179 Berlin
Entry €3,00

RSVP to events@dialogueberlin.com

Lorraine Adams The Room and the Chair reading

Lorraine Adams is a novelist, critic and Pulitzer Prize winning journalist. Her new novel, her second, is The Room and the Chair, and it moves from Afghanistan to an American newspaper, from Iran to Washington DC. She populates the novel with the normally silent participants in America’s fight against terrorism — the cub reporter, the Iranian nuclear scientist, the women in the military, and the midlevel editors and military men who wield no real power and cannot stop the madness they see around them. Like her first book Harbor, which told the story of an Algerian refugee newly on America’s shores, Adams has a knack for illuminating the headlines of the day, bringing humanity and a sense of timelessness to the issues that plague us. She will be in conversation with Bookslut.com editor Jessa Crispin.

Friday 28th May
19:30 – 21:30
Café Hilde
Metzer Straße 22
10405 Berlin
FREE ENTRY

James Miller Sunshine State reading

‘Ruined buildings dotted the expanse of the beach, their warped forms and gutted foundations giving the merest hint of the metropolis that stood before. Confronted with such destruction, he found it hard to believe that ten years ago Miami had been a thriving, cosmopolitan city of six million.’

Acclaimed new British novelist James Miller presents his second book, Sunshine State, at Berlin’s Café Hilde. Miller’s debut novel Lost Boys was described by The Times as a ‘powerful, entertaining and disturbing read’. In his latest novel, Miller once again imagines a dystopian near-future, with a postmodern thriller played out in Florida ‘(the Storm Zone’) against a backdrop of religious fundamentalism and ecological disaster. Sunshine State takes on the story of a British secret agent operating in an anarchic region of a future United States racked by devastating hurricanes, dangerous cults, criminal gangs and insurgent armies. Dialogue Berlin is very happy to welcome James Miller to Germany for this exclusive reading.

‘This is a novel of compelling imagination. It is also a literary thriller which simmers with energy, powering a bristling narrative.’ Independent

Wednesday 19 May
19:30 – 21:30
Café Hilde
Metzer Straße 22
10405 Berlin
FREE ENTRY

Catherine Hales — Poetry Book Launch

poetry collection, Hazard or Fall, in the first of Dialogue Berlin’s
poetry events at Café Hilde in Prenzlauer Berg. Published by Shearsman
Books, Harzard and Fall is Catherine Hale’s first full-length
collection.

Described by Exberliner as a ‘Berlin poetry heavyweight’, Catherine
Hales grew up near the Thames in Surrey and studied Comparative
Literature in Norwich before moving to Germany. Since 1999 she has
lived in Berlin, where she works as a freelance translator. She has
also been engaged as a teacher, nursery gardener, a census
transcriber, a street musician, a video sound engineer and a film
extra.

For Hales, ‘the necessity of poetry is to irritate, to evoke the
uncomfortable response. Scraps of language from different places and
registers… coalesce and collide, creating meaning from their
juxtaposition, meaning that is not subject to control or definition
but… questions the rules by which we are obliged to live…’

Catherine Hales is co-organiser of Poetry Hearings, Berlin’s festival

German poetry have appeared in many magazines, including Tears in the
Fence, Poetry Salzburg Review, Fire, Stride, Orbis, Haiku Quarterly,
Brittle Star, Great Works and Shadowtrain. Hales has translated work
by Berlin-based poet Norbert Hummelt, while her dual-language output
includes collaborations with Germany poets Anna Hoffmann  and Marcus
Roloff.

‘Look in vain for (linear) narrative, for anecdote, for epiphanies,
for messages, for making-the world-a-better-place: the world is a mess
and language is messy and the world is language and any attempt to
tidy it up with poetry is falsification. There is no utopian vision…’
Catherine Hales

Café Hilde is located at the corner of Metzer Strasse and Prenzlauer
Allee in Prenzlauer Berg. Hilde offers draught beers as well as
freshly prepared foods and fair trade coffee.

Wednesday 14 April
19:30 – 21:30

FREE ENTRY

www.dialogueberlin.com
www.hilde-berlin.com

Peter Riley and Alistair Noon

Thursday 25 March from 19:00

Dialogue Berlin is very pleased to welcome two outstanding British poets to Berlin to begin our programme of poetry events.

Peter Riley is widely regarded as one of the most important British poets writing today. Born in 1940 near Manchester, he has published books of poetry with, among others, Carcanet and Shearsman, most recently the prose-poem collection Greek Passages (Shearsman, 2009). His work has been described as ‘an extraordinary poetry, one which takes the techniques of modernism to almost a certain limit, yet retains the entire lyric and emotional intensity of the English tradition’ (Mark Scroggins).

As well as poetry, Riley has written studies of improvised music, lead mines, burial mounds and Transylvanian string bands.

Alongside Riley, Berlin-based Alistair Noon will read from his latest book In People’s Park, as well as from forthcoming publications. Founder of Poetry Hearings, Berlin’s annual English-language poetry festival, Noon has played an active role in the Anglophone literary scene in the city over the last few years. Says Giles Goodland: ‘I don’t know any poet who files about so carefreely, never alighting in the pigeonhole for long enough to become ringed’.

Space is limited, so please reserve your ticket, and join us for the reading and discussion — and a glass of wine — on Thursday 25 March from 19:00.

Entry €5.00
Dialogue Berlin at the T Room
Christinenstraße 27
10119 Berlin
RSVP to events@dialogueberlin.com

Abandoned Images

Dialogue Berlin presents Stephen Barber
Reading and discussion

Wednesday 17 February 19:00

What does the future hold for film, and especially for its distinctive cinema spaces and the cities that surround them?

The last decades have seen some extraordinary transformations in the ways in which we experience film, notably within the urban space. In his new book Abandoned Images, Stephen Barber explores a unique avenue of derelict but intact film palaces in Downtown Los Angeles.

Dating from the 1910s and 1920s, these spectacular early picture palaces now stand vacated or are invaded by fast food chains and bingo halls. Haunted, haunting, and aberrantly surviving, they echo abandoned or re-used cinemas worldwide – including those of Berlin. The film palaces are charged with implications both for cinema’s spectacular history and for its future experiences.

Stephen Barber will be reading from his book at Dialogue Berlin, before discussing cinematic spaces and their future with Verena von Stackelberg.

The Times has called Stephen Barber’s books ‘brilliant, profound and provocative’, while the Independent identifies him as ‘a writer of real distinction’. Barber’s other books include Projected Cities (2002), The Films of the Vienna Action Group (2004), and The Vanishing Map (2006). He lives in Berlin.

‘Picture Palaces, once attended with the same fervor as the holy church, stand empty and vacated. But cinemas in new shapes and forms, and films that are ever more radical and innovative, live on.’ – Verena von Stackelberg

Combining café culture and literature, Dialogue Berlin is Berlin’s unique source for new, English-language books and magazines. Dialogue hosts innovative cultural and literary events, and provides a forum for debate and discussion.

Entry €5.00
Limited places – RSVP essential