The Dissident

New York: ECCO Press, 2006. First Edition. Hardcover. New/New. From the PEN/Malamud Award-winning author of Lucky Girls comes an intricately woven novel about secrets, love, art, identity, and the shining chaos of every day American life.

Yuan Zhao, a celebrated Chinese performance artist and political dissident, has accepted a one-year artist's residency in Los Angeles. He is to be a Visiting Scholar at the St. Anselm's School for Girls, teaching advanced art, and hosted by one of the school's most devoted families: the wealthy if dysfunctional Traverses. The Traverses are too preoccupied with their own problems to pay their foreign guest too much attention, and the dissident is delighted to be left alone-his past links with radical movements give him good reason to avoid careful scrutiny. The trouble starts when he and his American hosts begin to view one another with clearer eyes.

About the author:
Nell Freudenberger is the author of the novels Lost and Wanted, The Newlyweds and The Dissident, and of the story collection Lucky Girls, which won the PEN/Malamud Award and the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Named one of The New Yorker's "20 under 40" in 2010, she is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, and a Cullman Fellowship from the New York Public Library. She lives in Brooklyn with her family.

Reviews:
"Every character in the book, even those who appear only for a few pages, is endowed with a sharp individuality." A.O. Scott, the New York Times, September 10, 2006

"The Dissident is so well put together that as soon as I finished it I was compelled to go back to the beginning to work out the sleight of hand that delivered such a satisfying twist to the plot. Her ear for the brittle conversation of families and her fascination for a brief period of contemporary Chinese culture are reason enough to applaud a debut novel of exceptional ambition and impressive assurance." Natasha Lehrer, The Observer, April 29, 2007.