ABSTRACT
Jenny Erpenbeck’s novel, explores the unlikely relationship a newly retired professor named Richard develops with a group of refugees in contemporary Berlin. Helon Habila’s novel is organized around the perspective of a Nigerian immigrant living in the United States who has come to Berlin with his wife, a photographer named Gina who is using funds from a fellowship to produce a series of portraits of refugees she calls Travelers. The discussion is followed by an analysis of Marwa Helal’s genre-bending Invasive Species, a book that blends poetry, memoir, and journalism with quotation and pastiche from other works in an approach to writing about borders, mobility, and migration that reaches beyond the limits and possibilities of any single genre.
