How to Read the Air
By Dinaw Mengestu
(Riverhead Trade, Paperback, 9781594485398, 320pp.)
Publication Date: October 4, 2011
Other Editions of This Title: Paperback, Hardcover, Hardcover
Categories: Literary
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Selected by Indie Booksellers for the October 2010 Indie Next ListA "beautifully written"* (New York Times Book Review) novel of redemption by a prize-winning international literary star.
From the acclaimed author of The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears comes a heartbreaking literary masterwork about love, family, and the power of imagination.
Following the death of his father Yosef, Jonas Woldemariam feels compelled to make sense of the volatile generational and cultural ties that have forged him. Leaving behind his marriage and job in New York, he sets out to retrace his mother and father's honeymoon as young Ethiopian immigrants and weave together a family history that will take him from the war-torn country of his parents' youth to a brighter vision of his life in America today. In so doing, he crafts a story- real or invented-that holds the possibility of reconciliation and redemption.
Dinaw Mengestu was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 1978. He is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, a fellowship in fiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts and a Lannan Literary Fellowship, and was named a “20 under 40” writer to watch by The New Yorker. Mengestu’s writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Harper’s, Granta, and other publications. He lives with his family in Washington, D.C.
Dinaw Mengestu's How to Read the Air is an unsentimental meditation on the immigrant experience and the illusory idea of asylum. With lyrical prose, he reassesses the by-your-bootstraps mythology associated with American mobility. More at NPR.org
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Dinaw Mengestu follows up The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears with a new novel: How to Read the Air. As his own marriage unravels in New York, Jonas -- the son of two Ethiopian immigrants -- retraces the journey of his parents' lives. More at NPR.org
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- Should Mariam and Yosef have stayed married to each other? Can a relationship survive a long separation?
This book is on these lists:
citylights98 book list continued by citylights98Shawnmarie's Wish List by shawnmarie
Z-k's Wish List by z-k
SereneFirefly's Wish List by SereneFirefly
Next Read by vpozzebon
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