The Red Squad (Hardcover)
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Description
E.M. Broner brings us a wonderfully comic and moving novel about the interwoven lives of a group of restless Midwestern grad students in the 1960s. Forty years later, gray-haired and spread around the country, they learn that they were under surveillance during their activist days.
At the center is Anka, a lively professor at an Ohio university, who receives an unsolicited Freedom of Information file charting her younger life as part of an eccentric crew who came together around politics and passion. She’s plunged into suspicion (who sent the file and why?), but also into rollicking memories of her compatriots in the “bullpen” of graduate school back in those days: Kevin, the sweet young priest in the process of formally leaving the church, who was her protector and secret crush; “The Farmer,” the only married man among them; the gay poet named Noble and his intimate, Ron, the black professor of Victorian studies; the irrepressible Bernstein, who yearned to start again in the promised land of Israel. One of them becomes a spy, the other a fugitive.
Filled with the rich details of the personal and political actions that solidified the group for a time and then splintered it into the l970s, the plot is animated by Anka’s longings for love and justice, and by the unfolding mystery of the Bullpenner who went underground. When their long lost comrade resurfaces, his plight brings all the pen-mates and some of their once prized students together at the glorious finale of this picaresque adventure.
Wise, funny, written in quicksilver prose, The Red Squad reminds us how relevant the lessons of the past still are today, and brings us a timeless message of community and hope.
About the Author
E. M. BRONER is the author of ten previous books. She has taught at Wayne State University and Sarah Lawrence College, and has been a visiting scholar at Ohio State University, Oberlin College, UCLA, and Haifa University. An award-winning playwright and NPR writer, she has also lectured around the world. She lives in New York City.
Praise for The Red Squad…
Advance praise for The Red Squad
“With high spirits and deep politics, The Red Squad takes us into the lives of midwestern peaceniks of the Sixties who fall under the surveillance of the FBI, and so later find an odd record of their heads and hearts. E. M. Broner gives us new friends and lasting values; who could ask for anything more?”
—Gloria Steinem
“This is a vivid tale of the Sixties, told by one of our most original novelists, from a marvelously unusual point of view. If ever a book demonstrated that the personal continues to be political, this is it. For those of us who were there, The Red Squad is an eye-opener; for those who weren’t, its an education. Either way, a pleasure to read.”
—Vivian Gornick
“Only E. M. Broner cold have written a book like this: a brilliant comic political novel, as original as it is fiercely anti-war.”
—Marilyn French
Praise for A Weave of Women
“An astonishment. E. M. Broner seeks nothing less than to achieve in a kind of epic poem, a recapitulation of female consciousness. It is circular and sinuous and ceremonial. I know of nothing else quite like it.”
—John Leonard, The New York Times
“A Weave of Women is going to be recognized as a masterpiece, an enduring work.”
—John Askins, The Detroit Free Press
Praise for Her Mothers
“Here is a contemporary classic . . . a book for every woman who is afraid of success, for every mother who hasn’t gotten over being just a daughter, for every daughter who feels somehow unborn . . . It’s the best new book I’ve read this year.”
—Christina Robb, The Boston Globe
