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
Tuesday, September 10, 2013
An American Family Disillusioned with America
Wednesday, November 14, 2012
Civil War Historian David Blight in the Times Union
Paul Grondahl wrote an article about Blight this past Sunday in the Times Union:
"Even after 150 years, the Civil War exerts a powerful and conflicting hold on the collective American imagination unlike any other event in the nation's history."
"David Blight, a professor of American history at Yale University and author of two books on the Civil War that have been called 'memory studies,' will present a lecture titled 'America Divided, Then and Now: The Civil War in our National and Local Imagination.'"
More: http://www.timesunion.com/living/article/Civil-War-historian-to-speak-4021294.php
More on the event: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/blight_david12.html
Read More......
Wednesday, February 8, 2012
In Search of America
The plotless (and widely acclaimed) novel Open City by Teju Cole (who visits Friday 2/10) is essentially a meandering story about meanderings.
At one point the Nigerian-American narrator visits an immigration detention center in Queens and meets a young Liberian man who has long nurtured dreams of emigrating to America.
The Liberian has undertaken an arduous journey from Liberia to Mali to Morocco to Spain to Portugal, gradually saving up enough money to purchase a false passport and fly to JFK airport in New York City. The narrator hears his story from behind a wall of plexiglass.
"The man who sat in front of me had a broad white smile. He was young, and dressed in an orange jumpsuit, as were all the other inmates. I introduced myself, and he smiled immediately and asked if I was African. He was as good-looking, as striking in appearance as any man I had ever seen. He had delicate cheekbones, a dark, even complexion, and the whites of his eyes were as vivid as his white teeth...."
To read more, buy the book.