Synopses & Reviews
From Agate Nesaule, acclaimed by writers across the globe from Doris Lessing to Tim O’Brien, comes a long-awaited novel.
In Love with Jerzy Kosinski is a story of courage and persistence, exploring in fiction the themes that gripped readers of Nesaule’s award-winning memoir,
A Woman in Amber. After fleeing Latvia as a child, Anna Duja escapes Russian confinement in displaced persons camps and eventually arrives in America. Years later, she finds herself in a different kind of captivity on isolated Cloudy Lake, Wisconsin, living with her disarming but manipulative husband, Stanley.
Inspired by the transformation of Polish-Jewish émigré Jerzy Kosinski from persecuted wartime escapee to celebrity author in America, Anna slips away from Stanley and Cloudy Lake in small steps: learning to drive, making friends, moving to Madison, falling in love, and learning to forgive. Readers will applaud the book’s power, the beauty of its prose, and its strong evocation of a woman gradually finding her way in the wake of trauma.
Winner, the Chancellor’s Regional Literary Award, University of Wisconsin-Whitewater
Review
“Nesaule, the author’s last name, means ‘no sun’ in Latvian, that is, the situation when there is no sun at all as well as the moments that are filled with light. This book is about sunless, sad, even tragic days in human lives (our own included) but it is also about radiance and joy.”—Janina Kursite, University of Latvia
Review
“A praise-song to truths of mind, heart, and body.”—Alison Townsend, author of Persephone in America
Review
“A beautiful, compelling story, wholly original, exposing a shadow culture, one that needs illumination and attention: Latvian immigrants’ struggle to make a life in the Midwest while coming to terms with war and histories political and personal.”—Heather Sellers, author of Georgia Under Water and The Boys I Borrow
Synopsis
The poems in Dancing with a Cowboy are charged with memories and hope, of family, old loves, nostalgia, and regret. Searching for shades of meaning that lurk around old, familiar corners, the poems are constructed from clues found there. Memories are reframed from a new point of reference, defining the curious, the sad, or the just plain ordinary. Tracking the hazardous and the happier moments of life, Rath writes the world alive, always catching its breath, carried forth by emotion."
Synopsis
From Agate Nesaule, acclaimed by writers across the globe from Doris Lessing to Tim O’Brien, comes a long-awaited novel. In Love with Jerzy Kosinski is a story of courage and persistence, exploring in fiction the themes that gripped readers of Nesaule’s award-winning memoir, A Woman in Amber.
About the Author
Agate Nesaule is author of A Woman in Amber: Healing the Trauma of War and Exile, which won an American Book Award. She was born in Latvia and grew up in the turmoil of World War II. A professor emerita of English and women’s studies at the University of Wisconsin–Whitewater, she lives, writes, and gardens in Madison.