Noted author Gish Jen has long been known as a chronicler of the American experiment. She is also given to throwing a curveball.
Her newest book, “The Resisters”, was a surprise even to her. How did she come to write a post-Automation, surveillance state, feminist baseball dystopia? Did she even know anything about baseball? Why is the book at once so alarming and so warm? And isn’t it really about parenting? She will attempt to answer these and other questions during the Monadnock Summer Lyceum livetream on Sunday, July 26 at 11 a.m.
Jen has published short works in the New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, and dozens of other periodicals, anthologies and textbooks. Her work was featured in a PBS American Masters’ special on the American novel. Jen is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is an awarded author of fiction and non-fiction including “Mona in the Promised Land”, “Typical American”, and “Who’s Irish?”
Katrina Kenison, a Peterborough resident since 2004, will serve as the Lyceum moderator. She began her publishing career at Houghton Mifflin Company in 1981 and in 1990, she became the fourth Series Editor of The Best American Short Stories. She and Jen met in 1992 when they were both pregnant, wrapped in towels, in the locker room of a health club in Cambridge. They realized they had more in common than impending motherhood, and a lifelong friendship was born.
At 10:45 a.m., music will be provided by Seven Times Salt — Karen Burciaga, renaissance violin and mezzo-soprano, Daniel Meyers, recorders, flutes, bagpipes, percussion and baritone, Josh Schreiber Shalem, Viola da Gamba, bass, Matthew Wright, lute, cittern, guitar, tenor, and Michael Barrett, recorder, lute, tenor.
Rebroadcasts are available on www.monadnocklyceum.org, on WSMN 1590AM at 11 a.m. the following Sunday or WUML 91.5FM at 11 a.m. the following Wednesday.
To listen to Jen’s talk, visit https://www.monadnocklyceum.org/ Sunday at 11 a.m.