The Romance of American Communism

- Reviews -

"The best book ever written on the inner life of socialists." - Corey Robin, New York Magazine"When first published in the 1970s, Vivian Gornick's book helped to launch her distinguished career as a writer and humanized, explained and, yes, romanticized, a generation of American radicals ... Thanks to the dysfunctionality of American capitalism, socialism has reentered the American political vocabulary. Gornick introduces us to a slice of history we need to know." - Eric Foner, author of Battles for Freedom"Gornick's language is so fresh and so blunt; it's a quintessentially American voice, and a beautiful one." - Dwight Garner, New York Times"I first read The Romance of American Communism in the early eighties, and it has been for many years the book I would rescue if my house was burning down. I based the the narrator of my first novel, The Cast Iron Shore, on the character of 'Diane Michaels, ' a vain shallow woman for whom communism had made her better than she was--'it could all have been so much worse.' Vivian Gornick explores the passion of ideas rather than the ideas themselves, how they make us human. This book has languished out of print for far too long." - Linda Grant, author of A Stranger City"A profound guide to the ecstasy and despair of living a life structured by political commitment. These accounts of ordinary Communists will make you ache for such a coherent and purposeful world, even as Gornick shows with enormous sensitivity how it all fell apart. In our new era of political intensity, everyone should have this subtle and exquisite book on hand." - Sarah Leonard"Her unrepentant belief in strong feeling as the heartbeat of any political approach to the world explains why, though many good histories of American communism have appeared since Romance, none have captured, elevated, and lit up the experience in quite the same way." - Lana Dee Povitz, Los Angeles Review of Books"She presents her interview subjects like characters in literature, as the protagonists of their own experience, and, for that reason, the book is not simply documentary but a work of literature, too, rich, moving, and contradictory." - Alexandra Schwartz, The New Yorker"Most brilliantly evoked, however, is the exhilaration of conversion and the soul-expanding experience of finding a cause ... again and again people speak of the sense of purpose and meaning they derived from being communists; they speak of a process of "becoming" and a sense of "wholeness": a cohesion between what they believed in and what they poured their life's efforts into." - Guardian"Romance is a color portrait against the black-and-white rhetoric of the Cold War.... The newfound interest in Romance speaks to a growing, shared desire to work, together, to extricate humankind from the trap in which it is now caught." - Sophie Pinkham, The New Republic"First published in 1977, Gornick's book feels as relevant now as it ever did. As new secular movements, from reactionary atavism to progressive social justice activism, capture our imaginations and provide us with a feeling of belonging, The Romance of American Communism, provides a valuable glimpse into just how vital these movements can be - and how potent they are at creating community." - Tara Isabella Burton, Washington Examiner"Gornick's task in Romance was clear. She wanted to rekindle [the] flame not for warmth but for illumination, to retrieve the truth of the communist experience, as it was lived from the inside, from the highbrow obscurantism of Cold War liberalism." - Corey Robin, The Nation

- Author Bio -

Vivian Gornick is a writer and critic whose work has received two National Book Critics Circle Award nominations and been collected in The Best American Essays 2014. Growing up in the Bronx amongst communists and socialists, Gornick became a legendary writer for Village Voice, chronicling the emergence of the feminist movement in the 1970s. Her works include the memoirs Fierce Attachments (1987) and The Odd Woman and the City (2015) and the classic text on writing, The Situation and the Story.

- Full Details -

Status:	Active
ISBN-13:	9781788735506
Published:	7 Apr 2020
Published In:	United Kingdom
Imprint:	Verso Books
Publisher:	Verso Books
Format:	Paperback
Height:	235mm
Width:	152mm
Weight:	368g
Pages:	288

- Delivery ETA -

In stock - for items in stock we aim to dispatch the next business day. For delivery in NZ allow 2-5 business days, with rural taking a wee bit longer.

Locally sourced in NZ - stock comes from a NZ supplier with an approximate delivery of 7-15 business days.

International Imports - stock is imported into NZ, depending on air or sea shipping option from the international supplier stock can take 10-30 working days to arrive into NZ. 

Pre-order Titles - delivery will vary depending on where the title is published, if local stock is available in NZ then 5-7 business days, for international imports it can be 10-30 business days. In all cases we will access the quickest supply option.

Delivery Packaging - we ship all items in cardboard sleeves or by box with either packing paper or corn starch chips. (We avoid using plastics bubble bags)

Tracking - Orders are delivered by track and trace courier and are fully insured, tracking information will be sent by email once dispatched.

View our full Order & Delivery information