Politics & Prose at Busboys and Poets, Takoma, hosts Lenore Myka presenting her new book King of The Gypsies and Virginia Pye with her new book Dreams of The Red Phoenix.
Winner of the G. S. Sharat Chandra Prize for Short Fiction, Myka’s first book focuses on life in post-communist Romania, which she experienced in the mid-1990s as a Peace Corps volunteer teaching English. Though each story stands alone, together they track the impact of recent political and economic changes through several strata of Romanian society, especially the disenfranchised, the traumatized, and, in side trips to America, the émigrés. The collection balances its focus on dislocation by following recurrent characters as they grow up and mature through a variety of experiences and relationships.
Pye, the author of River of Dust, draws on her family’s past for her second novel, set in 1937 China. As the Japanese invade, Shirley, a recently widowed American missionary, has to decide where her loyalties lie. Torn between wanting to see her son safely out of the fray, yet drawn to the idealism of the Chinese—and of one Red Army soldier in particular—she first offers her home as a clinic and nurses the wounded, then, as her son faces increasing ostracism as a “foreign devil,” decides to flee while she still can.
