Andrea Scrima


Andrea Scrima is an American novelist, essayist, and artist living in Berlin, Germany. An extensive essay on her experiences as an American living more than half her life abroad appeared 3 July 2018 in The Millions. In 2021, these observations were continued in the essay “On the Weaponization of Language in a Traumatized Nation,” published in LitHub.

Early life

Andrea Scrima grew up on Staten Island, New York as one of four children. An early interest in mathematics led to a National Science Foundation scholarship for the high school summer program in mathematics at Bard College in 1977. From the age of fifteen, she took part in courses in painting and drawing at the Parsons School of Design's Summer Program and the Saturday Program at Cooper Union. Scrima studied fine arts at the School of Visual Arts and received a BFA in 1983. In 1984, a scholarship from the Stiftung Luftbrückendank brought her to West Berlin, where she received the German Meisterschüler degree in fine arts at the Berlin University of the Arts in 1986.

Career

Scrima has received numerous awards for her artistic work, including the Lingener Kunstpreis and a grant from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. She worked mainly in painting and text installation and exhibited widely before she began writing in a literary context.

Novels

Scrima's first book, A Lesser Day, was published in 2010. A German edition titled Wie viele Tage was published in 2018. In an early review, The Brooklyn Rail called it a "small, wondrous book", and reviewed it once again when the second edition came out in 2018, calling it a "brilliant debut novel" in which a "delicious unease slowly builds".
A Lesser Day records an artist's restless life on two continents as five locations in Berlin and New York of the 1980s and 1990s serve as touchstones for a work of poetic prose that inquires into the way memory inscribes itself into place. Kate Christensen writes: "Scrima paints vivid, detailed memories of places to evoke a web of intimate relationships that emerges gradually from a temporal fog into shocking, unforgettable clarity", while Robert Goolrick calls A Lesser Day "a monument to the human struggle to survive, to remember, to understand, and to love". The German translation, titled Wie viele Tage, was published by Literaturverlag Droschl, Graz, Austria in 2018 to great acclaim, with Bettina Schulte of the Badische Zeitung noting its "uncanny precision of perception" and Claudia Fuchs of SWR2 its "remarkable freedom of thought and agency". In the German daily paper Die Taz, Elisabeth Wagner writes: "The narrator of A Lesser Day takes her ambivalence, her 'difficulty with the present tense' as the departure point of a quest in which writing becomes a means of merging with life. In her mind, she need only open a drawer in the old kitchen cabinet on Staten Island or imagine the Italian language primers from school or remember how, 'in this vast empire of our childhood,’ she invented 'scientific facts' about the universe for her brother, and already the figures are set into motion This is a high art, and it testifies to the richness of a book that succeeds in freeing itself from any concerns of self-assertion to create a space in which the reader indeed begins to think more precisely, see more clearly—and become more receptive and sentient."
Scrima received a literature grant from the Berlin Council on Science, Research, and the Arts in 2004; she won a Hackney Literary Award for her short story Sisters and took part in residencies at Ledig House, New York; and Schloss Salem, Germany. An excerpt of a novel-in-progress won second prize in the National Glimmer Train Fiction Open.
Scrima took part in the 2016 Stadtsprachen Literary Festival in Berlin and was invited to read from and discuss the German edition of A Lesser Day, Wie viele Tage, at the 2018 Poetische Quellen literary festival in Bad Oeynhausen and the 2018 Erlanger Poetenfest in Erlangen, Germany.
In 2021, Literaturverlag Droschl published the German edition of Scrima’s second novel, Like Lips, Like Skins, under the title Kreisläufe, a word that carries multiple meanings including cycles, circuits, circulations, which are themes in this novel about family trauma. Kreisläufe received extensive praise in the German-language press, with Paul Jandl of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung observing: “With tender justice and laconic resistance, it seeks to elucidate grievances in family relationships, one might say the injustice of life itself In the end, there aren’t very many authors writing in the literary field today as capable of evoking these images in such detail and with such depth as Andrea Scrima.” Maria Frisé calls Scrima a “powerful storyteller” in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, while Dussmann’s included Kreisläufe in their podcast “Criminally Underrated” and spoke about “the genius of this book,” which “spreads out into wider reflections on how memory works, and how we often only remember the memory of a memory, or the story of a memory we’ve told ourselves.” Anne Kohlick of Deutschlandfunkkultur writes: “Again and again, between its temporal layers, the book opens up the various ‘cans’ that memory is stored in. And just like with the fabled Pandora’s Box, the moment the lid is removed, dangerous forces rush to escape: emotional and physical abuse, mental illness, the devastating after-effects of psychopharmaceuticals—and all of it presented in a fragmentary narrative form that echoes the very structures our memories operate within.” In the taz, Elisabeth Wagner calls the book “wise and beautiful it’s hard to imagine not admiring the formal sophistication of this book. The delicate transitions between grammatical forms of past and present, for instance, which slip by unnoticed as one moves through time and space.” Kreisläufe was also reviewed in the magazines Hotlist and literaturblatt and the blogs Gute Literatur—Meine Empfehlung and Literaturleuchtet. The German author Ally Klein interviewed Andrea Scrima for a two-part interview published on Three Quarks Daily. Andrea Scrima has received several research grants from the Berlin Council on Science, Research, and the Arts, has spent several working periods in Florence, Italy, as the guest of the Villa Romana, and was awarded a 2023 fellowship at the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation in Taos, New Mexico.

Visual art

Prior to her decision to focus on literature, Scrima worked as a professional artist for many years, incorporating short fiction pieces into large-scale text installations, many of which have been site-specific. She has received numerous awards for her artistic work, including the Lingener Kunstpreis and a grant from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and has exhibited internationally. In 2018, she presented the exhibition "The Ethnic Chinese Millionaire" in the Berlin project space Manière Noire, a room-sized text installation based on the description of a newspaper photograph. In 2020, Scrima took part in a group show at the Haus der Statistik titled “The New Normal” with drawings and a video of her essay "Corona Report." In 2021, the Katharina Maria Raab Gallery in Berlin included four work groups from Scrima’s drawing series Loopy Loonies in the exhibition "Fragility." In 2021/22, Andrea Scrima collaborated with the artist Anike Joyce Sadiq on a joint piece on institutional criticism in the form of a conversation titled "Against the Erasure of Dissent," published in the German original by Künstlerhaus Stuttgart and presented at the Villa Romana in the context of the conference series "Manifestiamo."

Literary criticism

Scrima has written critical essays for numerous journals including The Rumpus, The Brooklyn Rail, Music & Literature, The Scofield, The Quarterly Conversation, Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics, The Millions, Times Literary Supplement, LitHub, and The ''American Scholar, as well as the German-language journals Schreibheft, Schreibkraft, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and Manuskripte.
She is a Monday columnist at 3QuarksDaily and editor-in-chief at the literary magazine Statorec, where she has published "Beyond the Bosphorus," "The Corona Issue," many of the works anthologized in Writing the Virus, a New York Times Sunday Book Review "New & Notable" title of 2021, and the more recent "Strange Bedfellows," a joint project with the Austrian literary magazine Manuskripte''.

Novels

  • A Lesser Day. Second Edition 2018.
  • Wie viele Tage. Translation: Barbara Jung.
  • Kreisläufe. Translation: Andrea Scrima and Christian von der Goltz.

    Anthologies

  • Wreckage of Reason II: Back to the Drawing Board. Spuyten Duyvil Press, Brooklyn, New York, 2014. All about love, nearly: excerpt from the blog Stories I tell myself when I can’t get to sleep at night.
  • Strange Attractors. University of Massachusetts Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, March 2019. All about love, nearly: excerpt from the blog Stories I tell myself when I can’t get to sleep at night.
  • Writing the Virus. Outpost19 Books, San Francisco, November 2020. “Corona Report.”

    Short stories

  • Sisters. Published November 2017 on the literary website Statorec. Winner of a 2007 Hackney Literary Award
  • Pandora's Children. Published November 2017 on the literary website ''Statorec''

    Essays (selection)

  • “The Slovenes of Lienz-Peggetz,” 3QuarksDaily, 1 August 2022
  • “Against the Erasure of Dissent,” 3QuarksDaily, 6 June 2022
  • “Returning to the Villa Romana,” 3QuarksDaily, 11 April 2022
  • “On the Weaponization of Language in a Traumatized Nation,” LitHub, 18 June 2021
  • “Wenn die Sprache zur Waffe wird,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, 6 June 2021
  • “Lessons in Abstraction: The strange life of Europe’s most overlooked modernist,” The American Scholar, 1 June 2021
  • "Corona Report." Statorec, 16 April 2020
  • "Slowly Falling: Andrea Scrima Recalls November 1989 in Berlin,” Times Literary Supplement, 5 November 2019
  • “Fiction in a World of Fear,” 3QuarksDaily, 9 September 2019
  • A Conversation between Andrea Scrima and Myriam Naumann on The Ethnic Chinese Millionaire,” 3QuarksDaily, 4 March 2019
  • "Between the Lines." 3Quarks Daily, 20 August 2018
  • "Was ist Patriotismus? Wie ich Amerika verlor." Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 19 August 2018
  • "Amerikas blinde Flecken: Don DeLillo lesen in dunklen Zeiten." Schreibheft, No. 91, August 2018
  • "Dubravka Ugrešić’s Fox." Music & Literature, 10 July 2018
  • "The Problem with Patriotism: A Critical Look at Collective Identity in the U.S. and Germany." The Millions, 3 July 2018
  • "Über die Unnachahmliche Lydia Davis." Manuskripte, Zeitschrift für Literatur, No. 220, June 2018
  • "Zwischen den Zeilen." Schreibkraft, No. 32, "Lesen und lesen lassen", June 2018
  • "The Problem of Home." The Scofield, issue 3.1, Winter 2017/2018
  • "On the Impossibility of Writing: Rainald Goetz." The Brooklyn Rail, Winter 2017/2018
  • "Wie viele Tage." Manuskripte, Zeitschrift für Literatur, No. 218, December 2017
  • "Rereading Don DeLillo in Dark Times." Adapted from a lecture given on 28 April 2017 at the New School, New York City. The Quarterly Conversation, No. 48, June 2017, republished in 3 Quarks Daily
  • "On David Krippendorff’s Nothing Escapes My Eyes." Lute & Drum, No. 7, October 2016
  • "This is US: Sang Real. Andrea Scrima talks to Patricia Thornley." Lute & Drum, No. 1, February 2015
  • "Mother Tongue: Leora Skolkin-Smith with Andrea Scrima." The Brooklyn Rail, winter 2014/2015
  • "The World’s Continuous Breathing: On the first and last stories of Clarice Lispector" in the collection A bela e a fera. Music & Literature, No. 4, spring 2014
  • "On the Inimitable Lydia Davis." The Quarterly Conversation, No. 35, spring 2014, republished in 3QuarksDaily
  • "Amazon in Exile: Lynda Schor’s Sexual Harassment Rules." The Brooklyn Rail, winter 2013/2014
  • "Seiobo There Below by László Krasznahorkai." The Quarterly Conversation, No. 33, fall 2013, republished in 3QuarksDaily
  • "A Few Words and the Scrap of a Tune: The Big Music by Kirsty Gunn." The Quarterly Conversation, No. 31, spring 2013
  • "Festival Neuer Literatur: Spotlight on New Writing from Austria, Germany, and Switzerland." The American Reader, February 2013
  • "All Words Suddenly Become Ridiculous: On Three Recent Translations of Thomas Bernhard." Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics, Vol. 7–1, January 2013
  • "Observations on Writing in Rainald Goetz." Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics, Vol. 7–1, January 2013
  • "Robert Walser’s The Walk '." The Brooklyn Rail, October 2012
  • "A Complete and Lucid Whole". The Brooklyn Rail, August 2012
  • "Robert Walser’s The Walk '." The Rumpus, 23 July 2012
  • "A Preposterous Proposal, But No, Not Quite: Helen DeWitt’s Lightning Rods." The Rumpus, 16 February 2012
  • "When Everything Stinks of Decay". The Brooklyn Rail, June 2011
  • "From Whatever Was Left of Their Authentic Selves". The Brooklyn Rail, February 2011
  • "The Political Eisenberg". The Brooklyn Rail, November 2010
  • "Tales of Woe". The Rumpus, 16 November 2010
  • "Something That Can Never Be Said With Words". The Rumpus, 20 September 2010
  • "Amnesia as a means of staying sane," Children of Berlin, ex. cat., P.S.1, N.Y. 2000
  • "Geschichten vom Werden der Kunst.", with Katrin Bettina Müller, neue bildende kunst, 1/97, February–March 1997
  • Andrea Scrima, "Through the Bullethole", New Observations: Voyeur’s Delight, Issue No. 112, N.Y., September 1996
  • "Künstler und Kritiker", with Katrin Bettina Müller, Alltag, Elefantenpress, Berlin, Volume 66, December 1994