Book details

In America

A Novel

Author: Susan Sontag

In America

In America

$11.99

About This Book

A glorious, sweeping new novel from the bestselling author of The Volcano Lover.

The Volcano Lover, Susan Sontag's bestselling 1992 novel, retold the love story of Emma Lady Hamilton and...

Page Count
432
On Sale
05/04/2001

Book Details

A glorious, sweeping new novel from the bestselling author of The Volcano Lover.

The Volcano Lover, Susan Sontag's bestselling 1992 novel, retold the love story of Emma Lady Hamilton and Lord Nelson with consummate power. In her enthralling new novel--once again based on a real story--Sontag shows us our own country on the cusp of modernity.

In 1876 a group of Poles led by Maryna Zalewska, Poland's greatest actress, travel to California to found a "utopian" commune. Maryna, who has renounced her career, is accompanied by her small son and husband; in her entourage is a rising young writer who is in love with her. The novel portrays a West that is still largely empty, where white settlers confront native Californians and Asian coolies. The image of America, and of California--as fantasy, as escape, as radical simplification--constantly meets a more complex reality. The commune fails and most of the émigrés go home, but Maryna stays and triumphs on the American stage.

In America is a big, juicy, surprising book--about a woman's search for self-transformation, about the fate of idealism, about the world of the theater--that will captivate its readers from the first page. It is Sontag's most delicious, most brilliant achievement.

In America is the winner of the 2000 National Book Award for Fiction.

Imprint Publisher

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

ISBN

9781429954303

In The News

“A passionate and often radical novel of ideas that affords all the old-fashioned pleasures of a traditional historical novel.” —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times on The Volcano Lover

About the Creators

In America

In America

$11.99