{"id":84013,"date":"2020-02-06T02:07:48","date_gmt":"2020-02-06T08:07:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/?p=84013"},"modified":"2020-02-10T10:05:41","modified_gmt":"2020-02-10T16:05:41","slug":"gish-jen-reads-from-her-new-dystopian-novel-the-resisters-monday-feb-10-at-off-square-books","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/gish-jen-reads-from-her-new-dystopian-novel-the-resisters-monday-feb-10-at-off-square-books\/","title":{"rendered":"Gish Jen Reads from Her New Dystopian Novel &#8220;The Resisters&#8221; Monday, February 10 at Off Square Books"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><strong>&#8220;<em>The Resisters<\/em>&nbsp;is palpably loving, smart, funny, and desperately unsettling. The novel should be required reading for the country both as a cautionary tale and because it is a stone-cold masterpiece. This is Gish Jen&#8217;s moment. She has pitched a perfect game.&#8221; \u2013Ann Patchett<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The time: not so long from now. The place: AutoAmerica. The land: half under water. The Internet: one part artificial intelligence, one part surveillance technology, and oddly human&#8211;even funny. The people: Divided. The angel-fair &#8220;Netted&#8221; have jobs, and literally occupy the high ground. The &#8220;Surplus&#8221; live on swampland if they&#8217;re lucky, on water if they&#8217;re not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The story: To a Surplus couple&#8211;he once a professor, she still a lawyer&#8211;is born a Blasian girl with a golden arm. At two, Gwen is hurling her stuffed animals from the crib; by ten, she can hit whatever target she likes. Her teens find her happily playing in an underground baseball league.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>When AutoAmerica rejoins the Olympics, though\u2014with a special eye on beating ChinRussia\u2014Gwen attracts interest. Soon she finds herself playing ball with the Netted even as her mother challenges the very foundations of this divided society.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>A moving and important story of an America that seems ever more possible,&nbsp;<em>The Resisters<\/em>&nbsp;is also the story of one family struggling to maintain its humanity and normalcy in circumstances that threaten their every value\u2014as well as their very existence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large is-resized\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" fetchpriority=\"high\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/02\/2015-GishJen-for-Knopf_condensed-688x1024-1.jpg?resize=204%2C303\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-84127\" width=\"204\" height=\"303\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/02\/2015-GishJen-for-Knopf_condensed-688x1024-1.jpg?w=688&amp;ssl=1 688w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/02\/2015-GishJen-for-Knopf_condensed-688x1024-1.jpg?resize=202%2C300&amp;ssl=1 202w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 204px) 100vw, 204px\" \/><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n<p>Extraordinary and ordinary, charming and electrifying, this is Gish Jen at her most irresistible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>About the Author<\/strong><br>Gish Jen&nbsp;is the author of four previous novels, a story collection, and two works of nonfiction, the latest of which was&nbsp;<em>The Girl at the Baggage Claim: Explaining the East-West Culture Gap.<\/em>&nbsp;Her honors include the Lannan Literary Award for fiction and the Mildred and Harold Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She teaches from time to time in China, and otherwise lives with her husband and two children in Cambridge, Massachusetts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"25\" height=\"16\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/06\/TheLocalVoiceLigature-25web.jpg?resize=25%2C16\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-14544\"\/><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;The Resisters&nbsp;is palpably loving, smart, funny, and desperately unsettling. The novel should be required reading for the country<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":238,"featured_media":84129,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2239],"tags":[15907,448,7067,4,15908],"class_list":["post-84013","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-local-literary-events","tag-gish-jen","tag-off-square-books","tag-ole-miss","tag-oxford","tag-the-resisters"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/02\/2020-2-05-Gish-Jen.jpg?fit=620%2C349&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84013","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/238"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=84013"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84013\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/84129"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=84013"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=84013"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=84013"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}