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.

Fantastic Women comprises eighteen stories by some of the most exciting contemporary women writers in the United States. The daughters of Franz Kafka and Mary Shelley, the Brothers Grimm, and Angela Carter, these inventive, insightful authors steep their narratives in a heady potion of surrealism and macabre black comedy. The result is wildly creative work that captures the potent truth about human nature far more clearly than much of the fiction (or, for that matter, the nonfiction) being written today. Why just women? More and more women writers are creating work that not only pushes the envelope but also folds realistic fiction into an origami dragon, transporting readers into worlds we've never seen before and digging deeper into the psychic bedrock than their male counterparts. So slip into a pocket universe, drive through a family's home, awake in the night to find you've become a deer, and dive into the ocean to join your mermaid mother. We can't imagine ever wanting to escape this spellbinding world, but if you must, best leave a trail of crumbs along your way.

A one-of-a-kind collection showcasing the energy of new African literature
Coming at a time when Africa and African writers are in the midst of a remarkable renaissance, "Gods and Soldiers" captures the vitality and urgency of African writing today. With stories from northern Arabic-speaking to southern Zulu-speaking writers, this collection conveys thirty different ways of approaching what it means to be African. Whether about life in the new urban melting pots of Cape Town and Luanda, or amid the battlefield chaos of Zimbabwe and Somalia, or set in the imaginary surreal landscapes born out of the oral storytelling tradition, these stories represent a striking cross section of extraordinary writing. Including works by J. M. Coetzee, Chimamanda Adichie, Nuruddin Farah, Binyavanga Wainaina, and Chinua Achebe, and edited by Rob Spillman of "Tin House" magazine, "Gods and Soldiers" features many pieces never before published, making it a vibrant and essential glimpse of Africa as it enters the twenty-first century.