Bryan Malessa

Decades after the emergence of ethnic literature as an essential element of the American literary tradition, The War Room is the first novel to fully explore German-Americans (the largest ethnic group in America presently and for the previous century) and why this fact remains so little known. Readers are taken on a disturbing journey of a young boy running from his past as he races headlong into the future he has desperately tried to avoid.

Bryan Malessa is a graduate of UC Berkeley, where he was awarded the Chancellor's and Eisner Prizes in literature. He is also a graduate of the Oscar Wilde Centre at Trinity College Dublin, where he researched much of the material included in The Flight and The War Room. His novels are written in an ostensibly simple form that contrast their underlying complexities, especially the issue of identity - ethnic, national, religious, sexual - and the conditioning humans undergo to reach such identities. He achieves this by combining diverse narrative elements, including academic, autobiography, bildungsroman, biography, epic, folktale and historical. At Berkeley he specialized in narratology and postcolonial theory. He has lived in many locations around the world and currently resides in greater Los Angeles.