Some news . . .
On Tuesday, June 23, at 7:30pm, I’ll be having a conversation about Serge Pey’s The Treasure of the Spanish Civil War, a new collection of stories about the Spanish Civil War, with Donald Nicholson-Smith, who translated the book from French. The conversation, which will take place online (register here!), is being hosted by Park Slope’s Community Bookstore. I wrote about the American experience of the Spanish Civil War for The New Yorker a few years ago, but Pey’s stories are concerned with the way Spaniards experienced the war, including the experiences that some of them had as refugees in France afterward. Please tune in!
Phil Christman, author of the new book Midwest Futures, has written a great essay for the Christian publisher Plough that looks at my novel Overthrow and also at recent books on technology by L. M. Sacasas and on union organizing by Jane McAlevey, as well as a re-issue of Vivian Gornick’s history of American Communism. Of Overthrow, Christman writes, “It’s a Philip K. Dick plot as experienced by Henry James characters,” which is from now on my elevator pitch for the novel.
Pekka Torvinen has written a generous review of Overthrow for the Finnish student magazine Ylioppilaslehti. At least I think it’s generous; it’s in Finnish. According to Google Translate, in any case, Torvinen writes, “The book often describes the environment quite unnecessarily for the plot. But ah, how often such a point made me stop and think about my own life!”