Jonathan Lethem launches New York State Writers Institute season
Acclaimed author to read from latest novel "Dissident Gardens"
Jonathan Lethem is a serious writer who has blended genres (sci-fi and mainstream literary) and garnered major awards: a MacArthur "genius" grant in 2005; the National Book Critics Circle award for "Motherless Brooklyn" in 1999; and World Fantasy Award for best collection of short stories for 1996's "The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye."His latest novel, "Dissident Gardens," is a multigenerational family tale about communists and radicals living in Queens, from the 1930s to the recent Occupy Wall Street movement, and is the biggest canvas Lethem has every worked with. Central to the novel is the tale of two women struggling to follow their dreams: the mercurial Rose, known as the Red Queen of Sunnyside, Queens, who torments anyone within reach; and her daughter Miriam, who, much to her mother's chagrin, embraces Greenwich Village counterculture.
