Anya Achtenberg – Live at University of Minnesota

On September 17th, 2008 Anya Achtenberg gave a reading from her new book The Stories of Devil-Girl as well as excerpts from other pieces of her work at the University of Minnesota Bookstore. We hope you will enjoy this rare chance to listen to the author read her own work on Authors Airwaves.

Devil-Girl is a storyteller smaller than a stain and larger than life, a mythic figure roaming the globe. Born into Brooklyn housing projects and the nightmares of her immigrant family, she becomes a runaway in the human marketplace of the streets of New York. Accompanied by her sense of outrage and sense of humor, ghosts of the ancestors and her prophetic vision, she moves from silence through rage into deep alliance with the marginalized.”Devil-Girl’s stories are all of our stories, all of the ‘discarded and demonized’, all of us who have had to fight to survive, to fight to tell our truths. Achtenberg’s wise survivor, Devil-Girl, is witness and seer, and her words are sustenance. There is much pain in this book, much wisdom, and a kind of beauty that sears itself into memory, a fierce beauty that is as necessary as air. Read this book.”
-Lisa D. Chave, Author of Destruction Bay; In An Angry Season