titles / Next Door Lived
a Girl by Stefan Kiesbye
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"This brief, fierce book evokes a world where everything is present
tense and everyone at risk. Stefan Kiesbye invites us on a guided tour
of something very close to Hell and points out the landmarks with skill;
Moritz, his protagonist, is clear-eyed first to last."
—Nicholas Delbanco, author of The Vagabonds
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Next Door Lived a Girl
Winner of the
2004 Novella Award
by Stefan Kiesbye
Trade Paperback
Price: $12.00
110 pages / 5.5X8.5
ISBN 0-9723363-2-X
Pub. Date: Jan. 15, 2005
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"This is Stefan Kiesbye's brilliant debut, a book
so quiet and yet so maddeningly powerful, you just have to wonder about
him a little bit. The setting is tribal, alien, hostile and middle-class.
The backdrop is the lingering and haunting ravages of war, a place where
society does not hold together, does not transmit ideals and values,
does not sustain notions of right and wrong. Inescapable is the rendering
of a human condition: ordered, spontaneous and shockingly violent.
"In clear and lucid prose, Next
Door Lived A Girl reads as the truest of true-crime novels. Its
protagonist is the remembering everyboy who suffers profoundly and in
turn commits the gravest of acts. His is a telling voice, agile, insightful
and darkly humorous. He does not ask for understanding because he knows
you could not possibly understand what happens and he does not ask for
forgiveness because he knows you could never forgive such terrible actions.
"But you do understand these events.
You understand them the same way you understand falling water or tumbling
stones. They happen and you can do no other than believe them. And at
the extreme reach of your heart's mind you do forgive, because, well,
what else can you do? This he earns from you and what he earns, he earns
the hard way.
"You will read from beginning to
end and you will feel this world and its inhabitants neither responding
nor reacting in ways you quite expect, but nevertheless, rising up beneath
you in a most compelling and unsettling way and when you are through
you will scratch your head and tell someone they have to read it too."
—Robert Olmstead, 2004 Novella Award judge
ABOUT
THE AUTHOR: Stefan Kiesbye was born on Northern Germany’s
Baltic coast. In 1985 he moved to West Berlin, since it offered a wall
and morbid exclusivity. He studied drama, performed on stages in Hamburg
and Berlin, and hosted a morning show for a Gay and Lesbian radio station.
After enrolling in American Studies, he received a German Academic Exchange
Service fellowship to study at SUNY at Buffalo, and graduated in 1998.
Three years later he received an MFA in Creative Writing from the University
of Michigan. Stefan Kiesbye’s stories and poems have appeared
in numerous magazines and anthologies. He currently teaches writing
at Eastern Michigan University and works as a freelance writer.
More Praise for Next Door Lived a Girl:
"Next Door Lived a Girl is both laconic
and feverish, with German adolescent boys poking their sometimes violent
way into the world. The violence here is somehow both surprising and
inevitable. The novella has a fascinating combination of everyday domestic
life and subsurface violence, and Stefan Kiesbye is to be praised for
this quietly eloquent tale, this mixture of the horrifying and the everyday."
—Charles Baxter
"Kiesbye's dark, distinctive vision of humanity, is composed with
such narrative skill and verve as to render the bleakness bracing, the
grimness utterly gripping. A significant and powerful debut." —Peter
Ho Davies
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