Jonathan Lethem: Dissident Gardens

by Lethem, Jonathan

ISBN: 9780099563426

Published: 2014

Longlisted for the 2015 Folio Prize Longlisted for the 2015 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award In 1955, Rose Zimmer got screwed. It wasnâe(tm)t the first time, and it wasnâe(tm)t the last. In fact, Rose âe" like all American Communists âe" got screwed by the entire twentieth century. She doesnâe(tm)t take it lying down. For over forty years she pounds the streets of Sunnyside Gardens, Queens, terrorising the neighbourhood, and her family, with the implacability of her beliefs, the sheer force of her grudge. And the generations that follow Rose will not easily escape her influence, her ire, her radicalism. Foremost among these is Miriam, Rose's charismatic and passionate want-away hippie daughter, who heads for the Greenwich Village of the Sixties; her black stepson Cicero, an angry debunking machine; and her bewildered grandson Sergius, who finds himself an orphan in the capitalist now. A radical family epic, and an alternative view of the American twentieth century, Dissident Gardens is...