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From the PEN/Malamud Award-winning author of Lucky Girls comes an intricately woven novel about secrets, love, art, identity, and the shining chaos of every day American life.
Yuan Zhao, a celebrated Chinese performance artist and political dissident, has accepted a one-year artist's residency in Los Angeles. He is to be a Visiting Scholar at the St. Anselm's School for Girls, teaching advanced art, and hosted by one of the school's most devoted families: the wealthy if dysfunctional Traverses. The Traverses are too preoccupied with their own problems to pay their foreign guest too much attention, and the dissident is delighted to be left alone—his past links with radical movements give him good reason to avoid careful scrutiny. The trouble starts when he and his American hosts begin to view one another with clearer eyes.
"Freudenberger sometimes missteps into humdrum Hollywood satire and uninspired relationship drama, but Zhao is distinctly fresh; it's when describing his journey that Freudenberger's novel takes flight." - Publishers Weekly
"...although the climax is less than satisfying, getting there is generally a pleasure, given Freudenberger's facile, insightful prose and strong characterizations." - Booklist
"Energetic, witty writing sparkles throughout a story with much satiric potential, but sketchy characterizations and passages of tedious exposition prevent its delivering fully on its promise." - Library Journal
"The book issignificantly flawed, by awkwardly handled exposition and several uncomfortably close echoes of Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections. Still, its vivid characters and page-turning plot make it a more than commendable first novel." - Kirkus Reviews
"Freudenberger demonstrates great talent for capturing the subtleties of cross-cultural and intergenerational relationships, as the dissident's struggles with his past and with his art intersect with Cece's unravelling." - The New Yorker
This information about The Dissident was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
David Jacobs
Nell Freudenberger is the author of the novels Lost and Wanted, The Newlyweds, and The Dissident, and of the story collection Lucky Girls, which won the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story and the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in New York, NY.
Name Pronunciation
Nell Freudenberger: FROY-den-burger
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