Details

ISBN-10: 1609384431
ISBN-13: 9781609384432
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
Publish Date: 10/01/2016
Dimensions: 9.10" L, 5.40" W, 0.50" H

Of This New World

Paperback

Price: $16.00

Overview

Of This New World offers a menagerie of utopias: real, imagined, and lost. Starting with the Garden of Eden and ending in a Mars colony, the stories wrestle with conflicts of idealism and practicality, communal ambition and individual kink. Stories jump between genres–from historical fiction to science fiction, realism to fabulism–but all ask that fundamental human question: is paradise really so impossible?

Over the course of twelve stories, Hyde writes with a mix of lyricism, humor, and masterful detail. A group of environmental missionaries seeks to start an ideal eco-society on an island in The Bahamas, only to unwittingly tyrannize the local inhabitants. The neglected daughter of a floundering hippie commune must adjust to conventional life with her un-groovy grandmother. Haunted by her years at a collegiate idyll, a young woman eulogizes a friendship. After indenturing his only son to the Shakers, an antebellum vegan turns to Louisa May Alcott’s famous family for help. And in the final story, a former drug addict chases a second chance at life in a government-sponsored space population program. An unmissable debut, the collection charts the worlds born in our dreams and bred in hope.

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Reviews
"Smart, stylish, and surprising, Of This New World is an inventive compendium of paradises lost. Starting with a married couple expelled from a certain unnamed garden, the collection charts the journeys of assorted outcasts, drifters, hippies, and astronauts as they set out to find their personal utopias, whether at an 'eco-revolution' boot camp in the Bahamas, a Shaker community in nineteenth-century America, or a colony on Mars. In stories that range fearlessly across space, time, and genre, Allegra Hyde keeps pursuing new variations on the collection's major theme. The result is an ambitious and memorable debut, in which a dozen different characters, looking for a dozen different paradises, all end up learning some customized version of that ultimate Miltonic lesson: 'the mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.'"–Bennett Sims, 2016 judge, 2016 John Simmons Short Fiction Award
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Details

ISBN-10: 1609384431
ISBN-13: 9781609384432
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
Publish Date: 10/01/2016
Dimensions: 9.10" L, 5.40" W, 0.50" H
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