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Dissident Gardens

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Unconventional family saga spanning generations of activists.

A must-read for those interested in American counterculture and the evolution of radicalism in America. You'll get lost in Lethem's captivating storytelling style and richly developed characters as they navigate their complex personal relationships and political convictions, ultimately reminding us of the undeniable connection between the personal and the political.

Note: While we do our best to ensure the accuracy of cover images, ISBNs may at times be reused for different editions of the same title which may hence appear as a different cover.
Sale

Dissident Gardens

Regular price Save up to 30%
Unit price
per
Compare to estimated retail price: S$37.17  
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ISBN: 9780385534932
Authors: Jonathan Lethem
Publisher: Doubleday
Date of Publication: 2013-09-10
Format: Hardcover
Related Topics: Literature
Goodreads rating: 3.27
(rated by 4018 readers)

Description

A dazzling novel from one of our finest writers—an epic yet intimate family saga about three generations of all-American radicalsAt the center of Jonathan Lethem’s superb new novel stand two extraordinary women. Rose Zimmer, the aptly nicknamed Red Queen of Sunnyside, Queens, is an unreconstructed Communist and mercurial tyrant who terrorizes her neighborhood and her family with the ferocity of her personality and the absolutism of her beliefs. Her brilliant and willful daughter, Miriam, is equally passionate in her activism, but flees Rose’s suffocating influence and embraces the Age of Aquarius counterculture of Greenwich Village.Both women cast spells that entrance or enchain the men in their lives: Rose’s aristocratic German Jewish husband, Albert; her nephew, the feckless chess hustler Lenny Angrush; Cicero Lookins, the brilliant son of her black cop lover; Miriam’s (slightly fraudulent) Irish folksinging husband, Tommy Gogan; their bewildered son, Sergius. These flawed, idealistic people all struggle to follow their own utopian dreams in an America where radicalism is viewed with bemusement, hostility, or indifference.As the decades pass—from the parlor communism of the ’30s, McCarthyism, the civil rights movement, ragged ’70s communes, the romanticization of the Sandinistas, up to the Occupy movement of the moment—we come to understand through Lethem’s extraordinarily vivid storytelling that the personal may be political, but the political, even more so, is personal.Brilliantly constructed as it weaves across time and among characters, Dissident Gardens is riotous and haunting, satiric and sympathetic—and a joy to read.
 

Unconventional family saga spanning generations of activists.

A must-read for those interested in American counterculture and the evolution of radicalism in America. You'll get lost in Lethem's captivating storytelling style and richly developed characters as they navigate their complex personal relationships and political convictions, ultimately reminding us of the undeniable connection between the personal and the political.

Note: While we do our best to ensure the accuracy of cover images, ISBNs may at times be reused for different editions of the same title which may hence appear as a different cover.