Product Description

A Notable Book

One of the Best Books of the Year: , ,

Jonathan Lethem, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and the MacArthur Fellowship whose writing has been called as ambitious as [Norman] Mailer, as funny as Philip Roth, and as stinging as Bob Dylan (), returns with an epic yet intimate family saga.

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 equally passionate and willful daughter, Miriam, flees Roses influence for the dawning counterculture of Greenwich Village. Despite their differences, they share a power to enchant the men in their lives: Roses aristocratic German Jewish husband, Albert; her feckless chess hustler cousin, Lenny; Cicero Lookins, the brilliant son of her black cop lover; Miriams (slightly fraudulent) Irish folksinger husband, Tommy Gogan; and their bewildered son, Sergius. Through Lethems vivid storytelling we come to understand that the personal may be political, but the political, even more so, is personal.