March 28th
7pm
A globe-spanning epic novel about a fractured New York family reckoning with the harms of the past and confronting humanity’s uncertain future, from award-winning author Jess Row
“Jess Row interrogated American whiteness with great creative power in Your Face in Mine and White Flights. The New Earth extends his thinking on historical amnesia and erasure, race and family, in extraordinary ways.” — Claudia Rankine, author of Citizen
For fifteen years, the Wilcoxes have been a family in name only. Though never the picture of happiness, they once seemed like a typical white Jewish clan from the Upper West Side. But in the early 2000s, two events ruptured the relationships between them. First, Naomi revealed to her children that her biological father was actually Black. In the aftermath, college-age daughter Bering left home to become a radical peace activist in Palestine’s West Bank, where she was killed by an Israeli Army sniper.
Now, in 2018, Winter Wilcox is getting married, and her only demand is that her mother, father, and brother emerge from their self-imposed isolations and gather once more. After decades of neglecting personal and political wounds, each remaining family member must face their fractured history and decide if they can ever reconcile.
Assembling a vast chorus of voices and ideas from across the globe, Jess Row “explodes the saga from within—blows the roof off, so to speak, to let in politics, race, theory, and the narrative self-awareness that the form had seemed hell-bent on ignoring” (Jonathan Lethem). The New Earth is a commanding investigation of our deep and impossible desire to undo the injustices we have both inflicted and been forced to endure.
We recommend that guests wear masks on the night.
Jess Row is the author of the novel Your Face in Mine, the essay collection White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination, and two collections of short stories, The Train to Lo Wu and Nobody Ever Gets Lost. He’s received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Whiting Writers Award; his writing has appeared in the New Yorker, The Atlantic, Granta, and many other publications. He teaches at NYU and lives in New York City and Plainfield, Vermont.
Nuar Alsadir's most recent book, Animal Joy: A Book of Laughter and Resuscitation (Graywolf Press/ Fitzcarraldo Editions), was a TIME Magazine must-read of 2022 and a Publisher's Weekly Best Book of 2022. She is also the author of two poetry collections: Fourth Person Singular, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Forward Prize for Best Collection, and More Shadow Than Bird. She is a fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities and a member of the curatorial board of The Racial Imaginary Institute. She works as a psychoanalyst in private practice in New York.
RSVP Below
In order to keep our events program running in uncertain times, we're asking attendees to hold their place with a $5 voucher, redeemable on the night of the event on any product in store or in our bar & café. You can alternatively reserve a spot by pre-purchasing the event book. If you have a change of heart or plans, write to events@mcnallyjackson.com and we'll gladly refund you and release your spot, up to 24 hours before the event. Thanks for understanding, and for supporting your local bookstore.
