THE US EMBASSY LITERATURE SERIES:
Jonathan Lethem reads from his novel Dissident Gardens (Der Garten der Dissidenten, Klett Cotta Verlag, 2014)
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 Rose’s influence to embrace the dawning counterculture of Greenwich Village.
These women cast spells over the men in their lives: Rose’s aristocratic German Jewish husband, Albert; her cousin, 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. Flawed and idealistic, Lethem’s characters struggle to inhabit the utopian dream 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.
“Lethem has written a brilliant, funny, compendious novel at whose heart lies a sharp, slim blade of thought and style. It is the quality of his perception, his empathy, that makes this material new: that sharpness is the sharpness of a mind at work, re-radicalising a radical era with notions both literary and political that are outside itself.” Rachel Cusk in The Guardian
Jonathan Lethem was born in Brooklyn, New York, went to Bennington College, Vermont, lived in San Francisco, moved back to New York in 1994 where he still lives. Dissident Gardens is his ninth novel. Amongst many other awards he won the National Book Critics Circle Award 1999 for Motherless Brooklyn. Jonathan Lethem is currently a fellow at the American Academy in Berlin.
Ruth discovers a Hello Kitty lunchbox washed up on the shore of her beach home. Within it lies a diary that expresses the hopes and dreams of a young girl. She suspects it might have arrived on a drift of debris from the 2011 tsunami. With every turn of the page, she is sucked deeper into an enchanting mystery.
Two doctors risk everything to save the life of a hunted child in this majestic debut about love, loss, and the unexpected ties that bind us together. “On the morning after the Feds burned down her house and took her father, Havaa woke from dreams of sea anemones.” Havaa, eight years old, hides in the woods and watches the blaze until her neighbor, Akhmed, discovers her sitting in the snow. Akhmed knows getting involved means risking his life, and there is no safe place to hide a child in a village where informers will do anything for a loaf of bread, but for reasons of his own, he sneaks her through the forest to the one place he thinks she might be safe: an abandoned hospital where the sole remaining doctor, Sonja Rabina, treats the wounded. Though Sonja protests that her hospital is not an orphanage, Akhmed convinces her to keep Havaa for a trial, and over the course of five extraordinary days, Sonja’s world will shift on its axis and reveal the intricate pattern of connections that weaves together the pasts of these three unlikely companions and unexpectedly decides their fate.
In this mesmerizing debut, a young American discovers he may be heir to the unclaimed estate of an English World War I officer, which launches him on a quest across Europe to uncover the elusive truth. Just after graduating college, Tristan Campbell receives a letter delivered by special courier to his apartment in San Francisco. It contains the phone number of a Mr. J. F. Prichard of Twyning & Hooper, Solicitors, in London—and news that could change Tristan’s life forever. The Steady Running of the Hour is a literary novel about a young man’s quest to inherit a fortune from the 1920s. The book involves many historical settings, including the Battle of the Somme and the British 1924 Mount Everest Expedition.
Cal is an American writer who drinks more than he writes. Layla is a beautiful young English woman interested in literature. One can be too careful in life, or one can be too wild. Where is the line? In this small fishing village near the Spanish / French border, where once lived Salvador Dali, Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Picasso, and other greats, a new generation of artists and writers continue in those decadent footsteps. As one character puts it, “No Lost Generation here, darling. This is Cadaqués. We are finding ourselves!”
Kiran Desai won the 2006 Booker Prize for her novel The Inheritance of Loss (dt. Erbin des verlorenen Landes). She is the daughter of Indian writer Anita Desai, grew up in India and England and has lived in the US since 1977.
Ben Marcus is the author of three novels, The Age of Wire and String (1995), Notable American Women (2002) and The Flame Alphabet (2012, dt. Flammenalphabet). His stories, essays and reviews have appeared in numerous publications.
Donald Ray Pollock reads from Knockemstiff.
Dina Nayeri reads from her novel A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea (Ein Teelöffel Land und Meer, mare-Verlag)