SITUATION REPORTSon theEMOTIONAL EQUIPOISE

About the Book

Unable to break into the tenured groves of academe, despite a solid and well-received doctoral dissertation, Chamberlin spent several decades of his life working as a historian, archivist, university teacher, lecturer, poet, essayist and writer of longer and shorter fictions while living in Manhattan, Germany, France, Italy, Washington DC and Greece. In 2001 he retired from an executive position at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC to move with his wife Lynn-Marie Smith to Key West, Florida to concentrate on a series of five novels revolving around the city of Berlin in the 20th century, one of which takes place in the Conch Republic, as the island of Key West is also known. His most recent books are Paris Now and Then: Memoirs, Opinions and a Companion to the City of Light for the Literate Traveler (2002, revised edition 2004), Mediterranean Sketches: Fictions, Memories and Metafictions (2005) and (with Nance Frank) Mario Sanchez: Once Upon a Way of Life (2006). Chamberlin also serves on the Durrell School of Corfu board of directors and faculty. The School has recently published his A Chronology of the Life and Times of Lawrence Durrell (2007).

About the Author

Born at Jersey City before the war, Brewster Chamberlin decided early in his life to become a novelist and poet. This romantic notion did not coincide with reality for long stretches of that life, but did result in a great mass of written material some of which did not find its way into the dustbin. He and his wife, Lynn-Marie Smith, had the good fortune to live for a year in a village in the South of France where he wrote among other things the first version of Radovic’s Dilemma. After teaching at several universities in the United States and Germany and working as a historian/archivist for much of his adult life at historical institutes and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC, he moved with Lynn-Marie to the sub-tropical island of Key West, Florida, where no winters mar the seascape and snow has never fallen in human history. Here he has devoted his time and energies to the creation of a four volume novel about the city of Berlin in the 20th century, the third volume of which takes place in Key West and Manhattan.