Wednesday, September 16, 2026

Red Hen Press Publishes Michelle Sacks’ Century-Spanning Berlin Stories

Red Hen Press, the Pasadena nonprofit literary publisher, released Michelle Sacks’ “Dancing at the End of the World,” a book of linked stories that follows Berlin from 1933 to the present, on Sept. 15.

Advance reviews have split: Kirkus Reviews found the book ambitious but its characters drawn too simply, while Booklist praised the stories’ complexity, according to the two reviews.

The book opens as fascism rises and the Weimar Republic collapses, and it introduces Klara von Arnsberg, the aristocratic daughter of a prominent industrialist, according to the publisher. Her life runs through the Holocaust, the postwar years, the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall, and later stories take in Turkish guest workers in the 1960s and Syrian refugees in this century, all linked to Klara, the press said.

Kirkus, in a review posted Aug. 3, said Klara’s role as a stand-in for the past and the author’s tendency toward simple binaries in her characters weaken the book. Booklist said the stories would stay with readers after they finish, according to the review as posted by Red Hen.

Authors blurbing the book were warmer. Pam Jenoff, the New York Times bestselling author of “Last Twilight in Paris,” ended her endorsement with “Brava!” Peter Mann, author of “The Torqued Man,” called it “A masterful portrait of a frayed, protean city held together by loss and hope.”

Sacks is the author of the novels “You Were Made for This” (Little, Brown and Company, 2018) and “All the Lost Things” (Little, Brown and Company, 2019) and the story collection “Stone Baby” (Northwestern University Press, 2017), and her work has been translated into eight languages. She lives in Cape Town, South Africa, according to the press’s newsletter.

Red Hen Press was founded in 1994 by Kate Gale and Mark E. Cull and describes itself as Los Angeles’ oldest nonprofit literary publisher.

“Dancing at the End of the World,” 280 pages, is available in tradepaper for $19.95, ISBN 9781636285092, through Bookshop, IndiePubs and Barnes & Noble, the publisher said.