A Brief Portrait of Small Deaths


Maaza Mengiste is a novelist and an essayist whose fiction and nonfiction examine the individual lives at stake during migration, war, and exile, and consider the intersections of art and violence.

Artist Bio

A Brief Portrait of Small Deaths, the author’s third novel, is a story set in Berlin during the interwar years. The book will focus on the life of a German painter and his model, an Afro-German woman, as Nazism rises in the country.


Award Year
2019
Status

In Progress


Excerpt by Maaza Mengiste

From my table next to a large window inside a café, I watch the young man. The orange glow of a late afternoon sun drapes him in thick layers, lying across his shoulders and accenting his face. I recognize him for the East African that he is, a young man of Eritrean or Ethiopian origin with a slender frame, delicate features, and large eyes. He has the gaunt look of other recently arrived immigrants whom I have met, a thinness that goes beyond a natural state of the body. He moves differently from one accustomed to the space he inhabits; his gait is a series of cautious, jagged steps forward. He appears frightened, overly sensitive to those who brush past him. He seems as if he is trying to coil inside himself, shrink enough to avoid being touched.

Maaza Mengiste, “This Is What the Journey Does,” New York Review of Books, 2018

Maaza Mengiste speaks about her work in progress, A Brief Portrait of Small Deaths.