Great Neck

In 1960, a group of friends are plucked from their sixth grade classroom in privileged Great Neck, Long Island and confronted for the first time with the horrors of the Holocaust. They hear a challenge from the past, a cry from history to set the world on a better course; but it is the murder of a much-loved older brother during Mississippi's Freedom Summer that makes their mission clear. From the front line of the civil rights movement to Andy Warhol's New York art scene, from comic book superheroes to the violent maelstrom of the Weather Underground,Great Neckimmerses us in a charged time not so long ago, and illuminates the lives of those who were shaped by its energies and ideals. Vigorous, funny, profound and altogether gripping, it is a masterpiece of contemporary literature.

Jay Cantor is the author of two other novels, <b>The Death of Che Guevara</b> and <b>Krazy Kat</b>, and two books of essays, <b>The Space Between: Literature and Politics</b><i> </i>and <b>On Giving Birth to One’s Own Mother</b><i>.</i> A MacArthur Prize fellow, Cantor teaches at Tufts University and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with his wife Melinda Marble, and their daughter, Grace.