An American Family Disillusioned with America

Ann Levin of the Huffington Post reviews Dissident Gardens by Jonathan Lethem, who visits Albany
tomorrow:

Jonathan Lethem's latest novel, "Dissident Gardens," is a tour de force, a brilliant, satiric journey through America's dissident history from 1930s-era communism to today's Occupy movement.

Its central character is Rose Zimmer, a staunch member of the American Communist Party whose affair with a black policeman draws the wrath of party apparatchiks. After getting booted from the party, she turns her energy to community organizing in Sunnyside Gardens, Queens, a housing development built in the 1920s to provide well-designed, affordable apartments with communal gardens to the urban working class.

More in the Huff Post:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/huff-wires/20130909/us-book-review-dissident-gardens/?utm_hp_ref=style&ir=style

More about Lethem's visit to Albany on 9/11:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/lethem_jonathan13.html

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Paul Auster and Siri Hustvedt tonight in Saratoga

Noted literary couple Paul Auster and Siri Hustvedt [pictured here] will share the stage tonight at a reading for the New York State Summer Writers Institute, Skidmore College, 8PM, free and open to the public, Davis Audiorium, Palamountain Hall, 815 North Broadway, Saratoga Springs.

All events in the series are free and open to the general public.

Auster's new memoir, Winter Journal, was just named by Huffington Post Books as one of the 11 Best Summer Books of 2012:

"Paul Auster's second memoir is surprisingly uncomplicated, except for the fact that it jumps around chronologically, and is written in the second person - which gives the book a sense of being spoken out loud, while staring into the mirror. Moments in Auster's life are arranged in interesting ways, such as an annotated list of all the houses he's ever lived in, and it's never less than readable." More.

Hustvedt's new essay collection Living Thinking Looking receives a rave in today's London Independent:

"Seeing is creating, for Hustvedt, and the meditations collected here amount to a lucid, absorbing and vigorous exploration of how we engage with the physical world, with art and with memory."  More.

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