Bryan Malessa

Bryan Joachim Malessa (born May 16, 1964 in Chagrin Falls, Ohio) is an American novelist. He is a graduate of University of California, Berkeley (BA), and the Oscar Wilde Centre at Trinity College, Dublin (MPhil). He lives in greater Los Angeles.

Novels

The Flight

His novel The Flight (Harper Perennial) is one of the first written in English to depict the Expulsion of Germans after World War II. In reviewing the novel, The Irish Times stated "With this story…Bryan Malessa joins the ranks of Günter Grass…in taking on the major preoccupations of post-war German literature – National Socialism and the fear of history repeating itself, the complicity of the German people in the crimes perpetuated in their name, and the role of literature in history and memory." Regarding the novel's controversial subject matter, The Independent (UK) wrote, "Only since the fall of the Iron Curtain has the subject begun to be discussed, and it remains highly sensitive. The Flight joins a small but growing body of literature on the subject, but the novel does not seek to exonerate the Germans."

The War Room

In Financial Times, Mark Simpson wrote “As an Englishman, I’ve always found the US to be a very German-flavoured kind of place. The organisation; presidential principle; laws against jaywalking; love of technology; Protestantism. But almost nowhere do you find it acknowledged – which is odd, as almost every other ethnicity that went into the famous “melting pot” is celebrated. But now an American writer has finally outed the US as secretly very German indeed. As Bryan Malessa’s new novel The War Room makes plain, Germans make up by far the largest ethnic group in the US, but are also almost completely invisible…Billed as ‘an epic investigation into America’s underbelly,’ The War Room has a Catcher in the Rye quality to it, but without the toxicity.” The Daily Mail (UK) noted that The War Room “is also an intensely detailed account of the psychology and tactics of bicycle racing.”

Other works

His story "Looking Out For Hope" (Voices of the Xiled, Doubleday, 1994) in memory of Raymond Carver was made into a short film directed by Phil Harder and scored by the rock band Low.

He is also editor of Re/mapping the Occident (University of California, 1995) and a journalist whose best-known piece is a widely cited career retrospective interview “Once Was King” with World Champion and three-time Tour de France winner Greg LeMond.