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Chodorkoff’s novel “Loisaida” to be released April 9, 2011

Loisaida

Authors:

n/a

Published:

ISE co-founder, longtime Director, and current Board member Dan Chodorkoff’s long-awaited and much-anticipated novel Loisaida is set to be released next week by Fomite Press. You will be able to purchase the novel via the Fomite Press website as well as Amazon, though we do not have that information as of this writing. Please do contact your local bookseller and request that they order Loisaida.

Here’s the novel’s description, as provided by Fomite Press:

Catherine, a young anarchist estranged from her parents and squatting in an abandoned building on New York’s Lower East Side is fighting with her boyfriend and conflicted about her work on an underground newspaper. After learning of a developer’s plans to demolish a community garden, Catherine builds an alliance with a group of Puerto Rican community activists. Together they confront the confluence of politics, money, and real estate that rule Manhattan.  All the while she learns important lessons from her great-grandmother’s life in the Yiddish anarchist movement that flourished on the Lower East Side at the turn of the century.

In this coming of age story, family saga, and tale of urban politics, Dan Chodorkoff explores the “principle of hope”, and examines how memory and imagination inform social change.

Advance Praise for Loisaida

Loisaida brings mid-twentieth century life in New York to readers with cinematic immediacy. Dan Chodorkoff’s remarkable ear for eavesdropping in on what Grace Paley called “cosmic dialogue of the streets,” and the way his sociological astuteness is present on every page, makes for an inimitable debut novel. Chodorkoff’s characters are –with all of their passionate politics,erotic craziness, unpredictable despair and joy, their big appetites for life — indispensable. Wonderfully animating the fundamental eccentricity of life and, page by page, full of passionate erudition, Loisaida is a indeed a powerful reading experience.”

Howard Norman, author of The Bird Artist and Devotion

Upcoming Reading

Dan is scheduled to read from Loisada at the New York Anarchist Book Fair in the Garden Room at Judson Memorial Church on Washington Square on Saturday April 9 at 2:30. If you are in the area, please consider attending!