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Christian Dittus
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THE NEW EARTH

Jess Row

A globe-spanning epic novel about a fractured New York family reckoning with the harms of the past and confronting an uncertain future, from award-winning author Jess Row

For fifteen years, the Wilcoxes have been a family in name only. Though never the picture of happiness, they once seemed like a typical white, Jewish clan from the Upper West Side. But in the early 2000s, two events ruptured the relationships between them. First, Naomi revealed to her children that her biological father was actually Black. In the aftermath, college-aged daughter Bering left home to become a radical peace activist in Palestine's West Bank, where she was killed by an Israeli Army sniper.

Now, in 2018, Winter Wilcox is getting married, and her only demand is that her mother, father, and brother emerge from their self-imposed isolations and gather once more. Decades of neglect have taken a toll on old wounds—personal, societal, and even ecological—and each remaining family member must finally decide if reconciliation is possible. Assembling a vast chorus of voices and ideas from across the globe, Jess Row "explodes the saga from within—blows the roof off, so to speak, to let in politics, race, theory, and the narrative self-awareness that the form had seemed hellbent on ignoring" (Jonathan Lethem). The New Earth is a commanding investigation of our deep and impossible desire to undo the injustices we have both inflicted and been forced to endure.

Jess Row is the author of two collections of short stories, The Train to Lo Wu and Nobody Ever Gets Lost, a novel, Your Face in Mine, and a collection of essays, White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Tin House, Conjunctions, Ploughshares, Granta, n+1, and elsewhere, has been anthologized three times in The Best American Short Stories, and has won two Pushcart Prizes and a PEN/O. Henry Award. He has received a Guggenheim fellowship, an NEA fellowship in fiction, a Whiting Writers Award, and a Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant. In 2007, he was named a “Best Young American Novelist” by Granta. His nonfiction and criticism appear often in The New Yorker, The New Republic, The New York Times Book Review, Bookforum, Threepenny Review, and Boston Review, among other venues. He directs the undergraduate creative writing program in the Department of English at NYU and is an ordained senior dharma teacher in the Kwan Um School of Zen.
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Published 2023-03-01 by Ecco Press

Comments

“In The New Earth Jess Row explodes the twentieth-century family saga from within—blows the roof off, so to speak, to let in politics, race, theory, and the narrative self-awareness that the form had seemed hellbent on ignoring. It's a wild gamble, and the result is a glorious win. The New Earth opens a panoramic view from within the space of this family, out onto a whole world: ours.” —Jonathan Lethem “Before it became fashionable, Jess Row interrogated whiteness with great creative power in Your Face in Mine and White Flights. His new novel, The New Earth, deals with historical amnesia and erasure, whiteness, and family, in incredible ways. This is essential reading for anyone interested in the ways in which racial and global dynamics manifest in our lives and relationships. The New Earth is an absolute triumph." —Claudia Rankine, author of Citizen: An American Lyric “The New Earth throws down a gauntlet around Jewishness, diaspora, race and passing in America with such tremendous force and beauty that the novel feels epochal. Indeed, it is hard to imagine that the American literary landscape will be the same after the effects of this work are felt. A novel at once sprawling and deeply intimate, I had to stop reading many times simply to marvel at Row's creation of this family, and the book that holds them. It's riveting and brilliant.” —Jordy Rosenberg, author of Confessions Of The Fox

“Row's magisterial latest (after the essay collection White Flights) traces the complex dynamics of a New York City family on a geopolitical scale This is Row's best work yet.” – Publisher's Weekly (Starred Review) “[A] deeply ambitious, genre-defying work, which hops back and forth in time, shifts between various points of view, and incorporates a massive amount of politics and theory on race, Zen Buddhism, climate change, the history of Israel and Palestine, and, among other things, the novel itself as a literary form.” — Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “[S]tupendously good novel Like Franzen's The Corrections (2001), this is a family saga with a global perspective, sweeping across borders and time, from Israel to Chiapas to the northeastern U.S., from the utopian communes of the 1970s to the present, and exploring the impending climate disaster, colonialism, race, identity, and wealth, along with some metafictional musing. Each character's story is a fascinating portal into contemporary life, adding up to a deeply moving, wonderfully engaging, and truly remarkable novel of the times” — Booklist “[Row] is reasserting the value of fiction about fiction — or finding fresh ground for the American family novel. The Wilcoxes suffer as many contemporary crises as the Lamberts of Jonathan Franzen, but they prove both more engaged and more moving.” – John Domini, L.A. Times “Jess Row's timing is impeccable: Two decades after the second intifada, as Israelis now throng the streets of their cities, demanding an end to the overreach of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government, Row publishes “The New Earth,” a rich, rollicking novel about a dysfunctional Jewish clan from the Upper West Side and the 2003 West Bank tragedy that derailed them .Each character's thoughts scamper like mice through mazes, a science experiment gone wrong, and yet the data they yield bolsters a tale that's both experimental and Balzacian, lighthearted and dead serious. No small feat.” – Hamilton Cain, The Washington Post “Even the staunchest Russian novelist might be hard pressed to match the particular gift for dysfunction that the Wilcoxes, subjects of Jess Row's sprawling metafiction “The New Earth,” display with such impressive esprit de corps across nearly 600 dense and often wildly discursive pages.” – The New York Times Book Review

France: Albin Michel;