AKADEMIE FORUM: ARIA ABER

Here she can escape the parallel city that made her, the public housing block packed with refugees and immigrants, where the bathrooms are infested with silverfish and the walls outside are graffitied with swastikas. 

Escaping into the clubs, Nila tries to outrun the shadow of her dead mother, once a feminist revolutionary; her catatonic, defeated father; and the cab-driver uncles who seem to idle on every corner. To anyone who asks, her family is Greek, not Afghani. And then she meets American writer Marlowe Woods, whose literary celebrity, though fading, opens her eyes to a world of patrons and festivals, one that imbues her dreams of life as an artist with new possibility. But as she finds herself drawn further into his orbit and ugly, barely submerged tensions begin to roil and claw beneath the city's cosmopolitan veneer, everything she hopes for, hates, and believes about herself will be challenged.


Aria Abers debut novel Good Girl is an ecstatic song in praise of the lost intimacy of youth—the shattering portrayal of a young artist swept up in a torrent of sex, drugs, violence, grief, and disintegrating family bonds.Aria Aber was born and raised in Germany and currently lives in Los Angeles. Her first poetry collection Hard Damage (2019) won the Prairie Schooner Raz-Shumaker Book Prize. A former Stegner Fellow, 2020 Whiting Award recipient, and current PhD candidate at USC, her poems have been published in The New Yorker, The New Republic, The Yale Review, Narrative, and POETRY, among others.


Presented in German

• With a musical contribution by Barenboim-Said Akademie student Blangelys Hidalgo (flute)