The powerHouse Arena is pleased to invite you to the book launch party for:

Memory Wall

by Anthony Doerr

Book Launch Party, Reading, and Signing

Wednesday, July 21, 7–9 PM
powerHouse Arena · 37 Main Street (corner of Water & Main St.) · DUMBO, Brooklyn
For more information, please call 718.666.3049
RSVP: rsvp@powerHouseArena.com

"It's fair to say that Anthony Doerr is doing things with the short story that have rarely been attempted and seldom achieved. The stories in Memory Wall have such scope and depth that they hit as hard as novels three times their length. Doerr has set a new standard, I think, for what a story can do."
—Dave Eggers, author of Zeitoun and What Is the What

This summer, award-winning writer Anthony Doerr, who penned the stunning debut collection The Shell Collector, returns with a new set of stories that is even more dazzling than the first. Each story deals with the concept of memory and its fragile yet powerful capacity to humanize the individual as much as the collective consciousness. Set on four continents and featuring protagonists of all ages and races, Memory Wall transports readers forwards and backwards in time, compelling us to interact with the most basic elements of our natural world—the seed pods, the snowflakes, and the fossils—while encouraging us to understand how we endow our lives with meaning. Doerr draws on his global travels, to places as exotic and far away as Africa and Alaska, and varied occupations, which include fish canning and sheep farming, to create a diverse collection that, at its heart, speaks to the common elements we all share: how and what we remember as an expression of what it means to be alive.

About Memory Wall:
In "Procreate, Generate," readers will find themselves transported to Wyoming as silent witnesses to the conception troubles Herb and his barren wife Imogen the Ice Queen are suffering. Imogen obsessively muses upon the possibility of prewritten, genetic failure, for "in every genealogy someone will always be the last: last leaf on the family tree, last stone in the family plot. Hasn't she learned this before?" Familial relationships are also at the center of "The Demilitarized Zone" in which both father and son find themselves to be outcasts—the father from his marriage, the son from his platoon in South Korea—and seek comfort in the simple sights that remind them of happier times. The parent-child dynamic in "Village 113" is somewhat estranged as the Seed Keeper is desperate to maintain her ties to her village and the simple beauty of natural order while her son, a government official, only cares for the unemotional assurance of mathematical equations and modern progress. How, the Seed Keeper wonders, does one remain loyal to a place? How can you take it with you? In "Afterworld," 81-year-old Esther Gramm nears death at her home in Geneva, Ohio as her seizures, which have plagued her from an early age, continue to worsen. Under the watchful eye of her college-aged grandson, she spends her last days outdoors and in a near constant dream state, reliving her childhood in World War II Hamburg and how she took refuge in her escapist drawings. As Robert learns how and why his grandmother escaped the Holocaust, the two reflect upon the definitions of "healthy" and "sick" and why one life is given preference over another.

About the Author:
Anthony Doerr is the author of three prior books, The Shell Collector, About Grace, and Four Seasons in Rome. Doerr's short fiction has won three O. Henry Prizes and has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories, The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, and The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Fiction. He has won the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize, the Rome Prize, and the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award. In 2007 Granta placed Doerr on its list of the "21 Best Young American Novelists." He writes a regular column on science books for The Boston Globe, and is the Writer-in-Residence for the State of Idaho. Doerr lives in Boise, Idaho with his wife and two sons. For more information, please visit www.anthonydoerr.com.

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For more information, please contact Aaron Lake Smith, Events Coordinator:
powerHouse Arena, 37 Main Street, Brooklyn, NY 11201
tel: 212.604.9074 fax: 212.366.5247 email: aaron@powerHouseArena.com