Dissident Gardens: A Novel

Dissident Gardens: A Novel

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.

Country	USA
Author	Jonathan Lethem
Binding	Hardcover
Brand	Brand: Doubleday
EAN	9780385534932
Edition	First Edition
Feature	Used Book in Good Condition
ISBN	0385534930
Label	Doubleday
Manufacturer	Doubleday
NumberOfItems	1
NumberOfPages	384
PublicationDate	2013-09-10
Publisher	Doubleday
ReleaseDate	2013-09-10
Studio	Doubleday

Dissident Gardens: A Novel

You might also like...