More and more, the city is expanding on its historic role as an incubator of books. Award winners and anonymous scribblers, locals and expatriates, everyone in Berlin has a book in him and everyone with a book in him seems to have roosted in Berlin. ... The teeming masses of authors are supported by a superstructure of foundations and grants and ubiquitous antiquariat (used-book stores) seemingly on every corner, not to mention the noble cultural villas, like the Literarisches Colloquium Berlin and the American Academy in Berlin, both on the same lovely lake — the Wannsee — near where the poet Heinrich von Kleist killed himself in 1811 after first shooting the incurably ill Henriette Vogel.Nicholas Kulish writes about the literary health of Berlin in The New York Times. One can't help but be envious. Foundations ... grants ... used bookshops ... cultural villas ... *sigh*
