Unter Schnee (Snowed Under) is an episodic novel composed of thirteen connected short stories. The action takes place in a small eastern European ski resort called Harrachov during the chaotic period following the fall of the Wall. Though the rapid process of Westernization has already begun making inroads into the sleepy town, traces of the defunct socialist regime cannot be erased from its residentsÆ memories or their way of doing things: The postmaster continues to inspect letters even if the old secret service has long since been deposed; a barkeeper blackmails a West German investor so he can finance a trip around the world; the last and only teen-ager in the town searches for a new identity over the internet; and finally there is Raik, a young entrepreneur who canÆt get anybody to buy his store mannequins, because he was an opposition leader and still behaves as though he were an outcast.

Though Strubel seems to be telling a love story, her topic is about the loss of nation and identity. Having lived through the rupture of a social system and country that suddenly disappeared (even if the people and places remained the same) Strubel, who was fifteen when the wall fell, observes the East / West friction through a double perspective--the failed utopia of socialism which she views with distrust, and an empty affluent west that she regards with skepticism.

Born 1974 in Potsdam, Antje Rávic Strubel studied American and German literature and psychology at Potsdam University and New York University. An author and free-lance journalist in Berlin, her novels include: Kältere Schichten der Luft (S. Fischer, 2007); Vom Dorf: Abenteur Geschichten zu Weihnachten (DTV, 2007); Tupolew 134 (C.H. Beck, 2004), Fremd Gehen: Ein Nachtstück (DTV, 2002), Unter Schnee (DTV, 2001) and Offene Blende (DTV, 2001). She is the German translator of Joan Didion's Year of Magical Thinking (Claasen, 2006). Her short stories have been anthologized widely. She is the recipient of numerous literary awards, including the Bremer Literature Award (2005), Marburger Literature Award (2005), the Roswitha-von-Gandersheim-Award (2003), The Academy of Arts Award for Literature (2002), and the Ernst-Willner-Award at the Ingeborg-Bachman competition in Klagenfurt (2001). She was writer-in-residence at the Villa Aurora (2004).
Zaia Alexander holds a Ph.D. in Germanic Languages and Literature from UCLA. She has taught in the German and Comparative Literature departments at UCLA and worked in the Scholars and Seminars Program at the Getty Research Institute, where she co-curated Peter Forgacs's The Danube Exodus: The Rippling Currents of the River. Her publications include "Primo Levi: On Translation" in the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to Primo Levi(2007), "The Translator's Diary" in Suitcase: A Journal for Transcultural Traffic, "The Danube Exodus: the Rippling Currents of the River" (co-authored with Marsha Kinder) in Future Cinema: The CinematicImaginary after Film (MIT) and co-authored with Antje Rávic Strubel "The Unfaithful Original in Neue Deutsche Literatur (NDL). A selection of her translations include the novel Unter Schnee (Snowed Under) by Antje Rávic Strubel, the Theresienstadt diary We're Alive and Life Goes On by Eva Roubickova (Henry Holt), and "On Translating and Being Translated" by Primo Levi (LA Times Sunday Book Review). She is currently Program Coordinator at the Villa Aurora Foundation for European-American Relations.