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When I began working on my novel, I Was a Teenage Communist, my teenage daughter said that it would be a big hit. “The kids love communism these days,” she told me. “All of those coming-of-age books for teens totally miss the mark. They don’t speak to what the kids are going through. We are concerned with social justice and reading books that tell us what other generations did to raise a voice.” I was heartened. Though I had my qualms, because even the word communism is slippery. All of the best books on communism from Das Kapital to The Romance of American Communism by Vivian Gornick leaves one wanting. Why? Because communism only exists as a utopian fantasy. Which is why I Was a Teenage Communist is a great book for young adults. It hits that sweet spot between righteousness and romance. The romantic notion that we could one day live in a classless society. Like what John Lennon sings in the song he wrote with Yoko, which she has only recently been credited with co-writing, the song Imagine. Nice song, nice dream. But let’s get real. Still, one can dream. This book is not written for teens, which is why they will probably like it. It is a book for millennials because they need a reason to dream.
It is a coming-of-age book for adults who need books with good love stories about outsiders and outcasts. Because we all used to be a teen at one point, and every teen is an outsider. But nowhere is one more an outsider than a punk pinko kid in Orange County, California during Ronald Reagan’s morning in America. The kids in this story find each other, find themselves, have awkward sex, flirt with rebellion, listen to great music from punk and new wave’s heyday, and glory in tweaking authority. The great books of literary fiction tell us something we didn’t know; they also tell us something that we knew but have forgotten.
I think a lot of people have forgotten what it was like to have that first orgasm. Or the moment when you found that thing about yourself, the missing element. And in that moment, you understood. You were this way. Not that. Not the way society expected you to be. But the way you were meant to be.
Eponymous Books is a brand new publishing imprint. Based in Brooklyn, Windsor Terrace Brooklyn to be exact; it hopes to bring forth novels that entertain and captivate. In other words to bring some fun into the whole idea of book publishing. With new titles like The Napper, I Was a Teenage Communist and Shit Show, right away you know that you are getting something different, perhaps irreverent, yet in the tradition of say Phillip Roth, Virginia Woolf, Octavia Butler, Sally Rooney, Elena Ferrante and other writers who have a compelling reason to put pen to paper or fingertips to an Olivetti. The Napper, the debut novel by Vietnamese American writer Linh Luu, tells the story of an Ivy League student from Vietnam in her freshman year, who cannot stop taking naps to deal with the stress of her new environs, a domineering mother and social diffidence. She forces herself to seek out lovers in an attempt to fill the void in her soul. Ultimately her journey takes her to Paris and to Vietnam where she has an epiphany in regard to the sacrifices her mother made on her behalf.
In the YA slash literary fiction novel, I Was a Teenage Communist, J.C. Hopkins tells the story of a group of diverse, non-conformist teenagers in high school during the 1980’s. With punk rock music as its soundtrack a group of teens discover Marxism and romance in the heart of Ronald Reagan’s America and find that in Orange County California asserting one’s sexual, political and racial identity can be hazardous to one’s health. Arthur Nersesian, author of the cult classic The Fuck Up, has a new novel which is entitled Shit Show, an apt title for the book and for the times we are living in. Heralded as the laureate of the East Village, Nersesian’s new novel begins in Stalinist Russia, takes us to the rain drenched days of the 1969 Woodstock Music Festival and culminates in the final minutes before the collapse of World Trade Center. Shit Show explores how personal obsessions collide with the cataclysms of history, and how not even drugs, rock and roll can spare us.