JOHN SAYLES

Filmmaker (Matewan, Eight Men Out) John Sayles will discuss his new novel, A Moment in the Sun, published in a gorgeous edition by McSweeney’s. A sweeping story taking place over five seminal years of history, Publishers Weekly says, “weighing in at nearly 1,000 pages, the behemoth recalls E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime, Pynchon’s Against the Day, and Dos Passos’s USA trilogy, tracking mostly unconnected characters whose collective stories create a vast, kaleidoscopic panorama of the turn of the last century.”

Registration/tickets not required, but bring your Malaprop's A Moment in the Sun receipt to get in the signing line.

John Sayles’s monumental new novel is set at the turn of the twentieth
century, as America is struggling to define itself in a rapidly
changing world. It is a time that sees the contentious dawn of U.S.
imperialism in Cuba and the Philippines, the last desperate stand of
Reconstruction in the American South, and the development of mass media
—especially motion pictures—as the lens through which the public will
increasingly interpret world events.

Sayles plunges the reader into this chaotic world, following the
interweaving lives of Royal Scott, a black man from Wilmington, North
Carolina, who has joined the 25th (Colored) Infantry to “be a credit
to his race” and attract the love of a woman far above his station;
Hod Brackenridge, a white laborer and vagabond who drifts into the
Colorado Volunteers to escape the harsh economic realities of the
times; Harry Manigault, a white Southerner drawn to New York and the
exciting new frontier of the movies; and Diosdado Concepción, a
Filipino “ilustrado” and linguist struggling to bring liberty to his
own deeply divided nation.

Traveling from the Yukon gold fields, to New York’s bustling Newspaper
Row, to Wilmington’s deadly racial coup of 1898, to the bitter
triumphs at El Caney and San Juan Hill in Cuba, and to war zones in
the Philippines, Some Time in the Sun is a book as big as its subject:
history rediscovered through the lives of the people who made it happen.

A Moment in the Sun (Hardcover)

By John Sayles

$29.00

ISBN-13: 9781936365180
Availability: Special Order - Subject to Availability
Published: McSweeney's, 5/2011

Other Editions of this Title

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