David Bezmozgis

Harvard Book Store is pleased to welcome bestselling short story writer, and one of The New Yorker's 20 Under 40 fiction writers, DAVID BEZMOZGIS as he reads from his debut novel, The Free World.

Summer, 1978. Brezhnev sits like a stone in the Kremlin, Israel and Egypt are inching toward peace, and in the bustling, polyglot streets of Rome, strange new creatures have appeared: thousands of Soviet Jews who have escaped to freedom through a crack in the Iron Curtain. Among the thousands who have landed in Italy to secure visas for new lives in the West are the members of the Krasnansky family—three generations of Russian Jews.

There is Samuil, an old communist and Red Army veteran, who reluctantly leaves the country to which he has dedicated himself body and soul; Karl, his eldest son, a man eager to embrace the opportunities emigration affords; his younger son, Alec, a carefree playboy for whom life has always been a game; and Polina, Alec’s new wife, who has risked the most by breaking with her old family to join this new one. Together, they will spend six months in Rome—their way station and purgatory. They will immerse themselves in the carnival of emigration, an Italy rife with love affairs and ruthless hustles, with dislocation and nostalgia, with the promise and peril of a better life.

"The Free World is an episodic chronicle, delivered in an understated style which can accommodate serious subtexts as well as ironical humour—all of which provokes comparisons with the Jewish literary heavyweights Saul Bellow and Mordecai Richler.... There is no doubt that Bezmozgis remains a writer worth monitoring."
—The Independent (UK)