L. Annette Binder will be back for South End Writes via ZOOM on August 11, 2020 to present her first novel of historical fiction, The Vanishing Sky. She will be joined in the conversation by Sandell Morse, the Maine-based award-winning author of The Spiral Shell: A French village Reveals Its Secrets of Jewish Resistance in World War II. Binder first read at the South End library in October 2012 from her short-story collection, Rise, a 2011 winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction, and a finalist in the Colorado Book Awards. For Zoom information, please go to the bottom of this page.
The author, a former attorney and a classics major, was born in Germany but raised and educated in Colorado where her parents moved when she was a child. Her novel is inspired by her family's experiences in World War II Germany. She knew that her father had spent time in the Hitler Youth but they never spoke of it. He died when she was sixteen. As a writer, she told South End Writes in 2012, she finds the seeds of her materials from "something I hear on the street," or "a blip in the newspapers," but that what drives her stories is "character."
In The Vanishing Sky, Binder takes the reader back to a rural setting in Germany near the end of World War II, where Etta Huber and her two young sons have become entrapped by the brutally re-ordered world of the Third Reich. The elder, Max, returns from the Eastern Front, haunted by what he has seen. Georg, Etta’s younger son, is off at a camp run by the Hitler Youth, digging trenches as the Allied armies approach.
"…The Vanishing Sky reveals the German home front as I've never seen it in fiction... Binder tells her story patiently, like an artist placing tiny pieces into a mosaic; this literary novel isn't one to race through. But I find it gripping, powerful, and a brave narrative, unsparing in its honesty…," wrote Larry Zuckerman for Historical Novels Review. Binder "uses Etta Huber, a hausfrau in a rural village, as a means of feeling her way back into the past, channeling the anguish and uncertainty of the final months of the fighting," said Alida Becker for the New York Times Book Review’s Summer Reading recommendations.
Binder has degrees from Harvard, UC Berkeley and the Programs in Writing at the University of California, Irvine. Her fiction has appeared in the Pushcart Prize Anthology, the PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, One Story, American Short Fiction, The Southern Review, Third Coast, Fairy Tale Review and others.
TO JOIN THE MEETING VIA ZOOM: