Dissident Gardens: A Novel (Vintage Contemporaries)

Dissident Gardens: A Novel (Vintage Contemporaries)

A dazzling novel from one of our finest writersâ€”an epic yet intimate family saga about three generations of all-American radicals

At the center of Jonathan Lethemâ€™s superb new novel stand two extraordinary women: Rose Zimmer, the aptly nicknamed Red Queen of Sunnyside, Queens, is an unreconstructed Communist who savages neighbors, family, and political comrades with the ferocity of her personality and the absolutism of her beliefs. Her precocious and willful daughter, Miriam, equally passionate in her activism, flees Roseâ€™s influence to embrace the dawning counterculture of Greenwich Village.
Â Â Â Â These women cast spells over the men in their lives: Roseâ€™s aristocratic German Jewish husband, Albert; her cousin, the feckless chess hustler Lenny Angrush; Cicero Lookins, the brilliant son of her black cop lover; Miriamâ€™s (slightly fraudulent) Irish folksinging husband, Tommy Gogan; their bewildered son, Sergius. Flawed and idealistic, Lethemâ€™s characters struggle to inhabit the utopian dream in an America where radicalism is viewed with bemusement, hostility, or indifference.
Â Â Â Â As the decades passâ€”from the parlor communism of the â€™30s, McCarthyism, the civil rights movement, ragged â€™70s communes, the romanticization of the Sandinistas, up to the Occupy movement of the momentâ€”we come to understand through Lethemâ€™s extraordinarily vivid storytelling that the personal may be political, but the political, even more so, is personal.
Â Â Â Â Lethemâ€™s characters may pursue their fates within History with a capital H, but his novel isâ€”at its mesmerizing, beating heartâ€”about love.

From the Hardcover edition.
Country USA
Manufacturer Vintage
Binding Kindle Edition
ReleaseDate 2013-09-10
Format Kindle eBook

Country	USA
Manufacturer	Vintage
Binding	Kindle Edition
ReleaseDate	2013-09-10
Format	Kindle eBook

Dissident Gardens: A Novel (Vintage Contemporaries)

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