LOCAL>> Virtual Book Club: Gish Jen – The Resisters

Come join City Librarian Henry Bankhead for a discussion of The Resisters, by Gish Jen.

An audacious wonder of a novel about baseball and a future America, from the always inventive and exciting author of The Love Wife and Who’s Irish.

The time: Some thirty-five years hence.
The place: AutoAmerica–governed by “Aunt Nettie,” an iBurrito of AI algorithms and the internet, in a land half under water.
The people: Divided into the angelfair “Netted,” whose fate it is to have jobs and live on high ground, and the mostly coppertoned “Surplus,” whose jobs have been stripped and whose sole duty now is to consume, living in plastic houses that talk and multi-colored houseboats at the water’s edge. Neither group is happy.

The story: A Surplus family–he was once a professor, she is still a lawyer–has a girl child, Gwen, who’s born with a golden arm. By two she can throw her toy animals straight to the same spot every time. When AutoAmerica and ChinRussia decide to revive the Olympics, suddenly Gwen, who’s been playing in the Resisters League her parents have organized, is in great demand.

Soon she’s at angelfair university, Net U, falling in love with her baseball coach and facing questions of “crossing over,” while her mother and her “group” are bringing charges before the botjudge about Surplus rights. An amazing story of a world that looks only too possible, and a family struggling to maintain its humanity in circumstances that daily threaten their every value as well as their very existence

Please register in advance.  After registering you will receive a link and instructions for how to participate on the day and time of the book club. We have some extra books put aside so contact us at 415-485-3323 if you need help requesting a book club book in our catalog.