Novelist Elizabeth Nunez to Read From ‘Anna In-Between’
at City Tech Book Signing on November 4, 4 p.m.
Brooklyn, NY — October 14, 2009 — New York City College of Technology (City Tech) will host a book reading and signing by novelist Elizabeth Nunez on Wednesday, November 4, 2009, from 4 to 6 p.m. in the President’s Conference Room, Namm Hall 318, 300 Jay Street (at Tillary), Downtown Brooklyn. Her latest work, Anna In-Between, was published by Akashic Books this past September.
The publisher has called Anna In-Between Nunez’s finest literary achievement to date. In spare prose, with laser-like attention to every word and juxtaposition of words, Nunez returns to her themes of emotional alienation, within the context of class and color discrimination, so richly developed in her earlier novels.
Anna, the novel’s main character, who has a successful publishing career in the U.S., is the daughter of an upper-class Caribbean family. While on vacation in the island home of her birth she discovers that her mother, Beatrice, has breast cancer. Beatrice categorically rejects all efforts to persuade her to go to the U.S. for treatment, even though it is, perhaps, her only chance of survival. Anna and her father, who tries to remain respectful of his wife’s wishes, must convince her to change her mind.
In a convergence of craftsmanship, unflinching honesty, and the ability to universalize the lives of her characters, Nunez tells a story that explores our longing for belonging to a community, the age-old love-repulsion relationship between mother and daughter, the Freudian overtones in the love between daughter and father, and the mutual respect that is essential for a successful marriage. One of the crowning achievements of this novel is that it shines a harsh light on the ambiguous situation of this ruling-class family who rose from the constraints of colonialism to employ their own servants.
Nunez, a Distinguish Professor of English at Medgar Evers College, is an award-winning author of seven novels, including Prospero’s Daughter (New York Times Editors’ Choice; 2006 Novel of the Year, Black Issues Book Review) and Bruised Hibiscus (American Book Award). She is co-editor with Jennifer Sparrow of the anthology Stories from Blue Latitudes: Caribbean Women Writers at Home and Abroad and is executive producer of the 2004 NY Emmy-nominated CUNY TV series Black Writers in America.
O, The Oprah Magazine, credits Nunez’s fiction as being composed of “…lush, lyric cadences and whirlwind narrative, [ that] cast a seductive spell.”
New York City College of Technology (City Tech) of The City University of New York (CUNY) is the largest public college of technology in New York State. Located at 300 Jay Street in Downtown Brooklyn, the College enrolls nearly 15,400 students in 60 baccalaureate, associate and specialized certificate programs.
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