Central Square - Hardcover

Packer, George

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1555972772 ISBN 13: 9781555972776

Publisher: Graywolf Press,U.S., 1998

Synopsis

This story revolves around three main characters who become entangled in each other's lives: Joe, who arrives in Boston and is mistaken for an African, rather than an African-American; Paula, a social worker; and Eric, a writer who struggles in a world that ignores his work.

About this title

About the Author

George Packer is a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq, which received numerous prizes and was named one of the ten best books of 2005 by The New York Times Book Review. He is also the author of the novels The Half Man and Central Square, and the works of nonfiction The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America, The Village of Waiting and Blood of the Liberals, which won the 2001 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award. His play, Betrayed, ran in Manhattan for five months in 2008 and won the Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Play. He lives in Brooklyn.

From the Back Cover

"Central Square confirms again that George Packer is one of the great young talents of American fiction. This beautifully wrought novel, about a city, a love affair, and the perpetual American hope for renewal, makes high art-- and compelling drama-- from the follies and compromises that attend all of those things."--Scott Turow

"Central Square is a novel about the moral life, yet is devoid of moralizing; a novel about the politics of class, gender, race and culture, yet is free of cant. Few writers have portrayed the contemporary, urban scene-- or the struggles of lovers-- with such honesty, feeling, and wisdom."--James Carroll

"Central Square is an exhilarating, thoroughly contemporary novel. Packer's vivid characters struggle with the large questions of late twentieth century urban life. Whatever the outcome for them, his readers are the clear winners."--Margot Livesey

"George Packer is one of the best: graceful stylist, brilliant observer, committed moralist. He paints a cultural and social landscape of remarkable breadth and acuity, grand and intimate at the same time. This engrossing novel is Dickensian in its scope, a work of true ambition and accomplishment."--Christopher Tilghman

From the Inside Flap

When Joe arrives in Boston and is mistaken for African-- rather than African American-- he quickly discovers that letting the illusion stand generates magic. A job, a place to live, even a kind of deference he's never known before are suddenly casually endowed upon him, a man who surely must have a closer connection to life's hidden possibilities.

Central Square bustles with the complexities and contradictions of today's urban existence as it tells what happens when the enigmatic Joe meets up with several other disparate characters. There is Paula, the social worker whose loneliness is intensified with each sad story she hears; Eric, the writer who struggles in a world that ignores his work and whose wife has abandoned him for pregnancy; the mysterious community group that has posted titillating "feel-good" signs around the city.

As characters collide with circumstances, and each other, George Packer's bold novel explores the conflict between personal desires and social constraints, and the unattainable balance between private life and the life of a community. Unafraid to expose the difficult truths about contemporary society, Central Square asks how we can find something decent to which to commit our lives.

George Packer has been a Peace Corps volunteer in Togo, West Africa, a carpenter in Boston, and a writing instructor at Harvard, Bennington, and Emerson. He is the author of The Village of Waiting, a memoir about his Peace Corps years, and the novel The Half Man. He now lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Edition details

• Publisher: Graywolf Press,U.S.
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1555972772
• ISBN 13: 9781555972776
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 304