Jess Row – författare

A Paperback Original

A sharply constructed, death-defying story collection that dismantles the myths of white America, revealing race, class, and gender as fictions that can be taken apart and remade

In his first story collection in fifteen years, Jess Row evokes white Americaspecifically liberal, educated white Northeasternersawkwardly and hilariously poised on the precipice of cultural and global collapse.

In ';The Empties,' a woman questions whether the writing skills she acquired at liberal arts college can be useful in the face of apocalypse. In ';Summer Song,' a chorus of bourgeois voices sings out its privileged discontent. ';Reading Group Guide' satirizes book-club chatter with questions that veer from the absurd to the obscene. Each story turns a lens on its own machinery, exposing the quiet politics encoded in literary convention. Using surgical precision, biting irony, and formal experimentation, Row pierces through the stories white America tells itselfand the narrative structures that make them seem natural, inevitable, and true.

Storyknife is a funny, troubling, indelible look at a culture whose rituals and expectations are dissolving into thin air.

A globe-spanning epic novel about a fractured New York family reckoning with the harms of the past and confronting humanity’s 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-age 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. After decades of neglecting personal and political wounds, each remaining family member must face their fractured history and decide if they can ever reconcile.

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 hell-bent 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.

A bold, incisive look at race and reparative writing in American fiction, by the author of Your Face in MineWhite Flights is a meditation on whiteness in American fiction and culture from the end of the civil rights movement to the present. At the heart of the book, Jess Row ties "white flight"-the movement of white Americans into segregated communities, whether in suburbs or newly gentrified downtowns-to white writers setting their stories in isolated or emotionally insulated landscapes, from the mountains of Idaho in Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping to the claustrophobic households in Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections. Row uses brilliant close readings of work from well-known writers such as Don DeLillo, Annie Dillard, Richard Ford, and David Foster Wallace to examine the ways these and other writers have sought imaginative space for themselves at the expense of engaging with race.White Flights aims to move fiction to a more inclusive place, and Row looks beyond criticism to consider writing as a reparative act. What would it mean, he asks, if writers used fiction "to approach each other again"? Row turns to the work of James Baldwin, Dorothy Allison, and James Alan McPherson to discuss interracial love in fiction, while also examining his own family heritage as a way to interrogate his position. A moving and provocative book that includes music, film, and literature in its arguments, White Flights is an essential work of cultural and literary criticism.

A bold, incisive look at race and reparative writing in American fiction, by the author of Your Face in MineWhite Flights is a meditation on whiteness in American fiction and culture from the end of the civil rights movement to the present. At the heart of the book, Jess Row ties “white flight”—the movement of white Americans into segregated communities, whether in suburbs or newly gentrified downtowns—to white writers setting their stories in isolated or emotionally insulated landscapes, from the mountains of Idaho in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping to the claustrophobic households in Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections. Row uses brilliant close readings of work from well-known writers such as Don DeLillo, Annie Dillard, Richard Ford, and David Foster Wallace to examine the ways these and other writers have sought imaginative space for themselves at the expense of engaging with race.White Flights aims to move fiction to a more inclusive place, and Row looks beyond criticism to consider writing as a reparative act. What would it mean, he asks, if writers used fiction “to approach each other again”? Row turns to the work of James Baldwin, Dorothy Allison, and James Alan McPherson to discuss interracial love in fiction, while also examining his own family heritage as a way to interrogate his position. A moving and provocative book that includes music, film, and literature in its arguments, White Flights is an essential work of cultural and literary criticism.