The Guest Lecture

Locations
Call Number: Adult Book / Fiction / General / Riker, Martin, Fiction / Riker, Martin
On Shelf At: Westgate Branch

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Westgate Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Fiction / General / Riker, Martin	4-week checkout	On Shelf
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	Fiction / Riker, Martin	4-week checkout	Due 04-19-2024
Malletts Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Fiction / General / Riker, Martin	4-week checkout	Due 05-24-2024

"With "a voice as clear, sincere, and wry as any I've read in current American fiction" (Joshua Cohen), Martin Riker's poignant and startlingly original novel asks how to foster a brave mind in anxious times, following a newly jobless academic rehearsing a speech on John Maynard Keynes for a surprising audience. In a hotel room in the middle of the night, Abby, a young feminist economist, lies awake next to her sleeping husband and daughter. Anxious that she is grossly underprepared for a talk she is presenting tomorrow on optimism and John Maynard Keynes, she has resolved to practice by using an ancient rhetorical method of assigning parts of her speech to different rooms in her house, and has brought along a comforting albeit imaginary companion to keep her on track-Keynes himself. Yet as she wanders with increasing alarm through the rooms of her own consciousness, Abby repeatedly finds herself straying from her prepared remarks on economic history, utopia, and Keynes's pragmatic optimism. A lapsed optimist herself, she has been struggling under the burden of supporting a family in an increasingly hostile America after being denied tenure at the university where she teaches. Confronting her own future at a time of global darkness, Abby undertakes a hero's quest through her memories to ideas hidden in the corners of her mind-a piecemeal intellectual history from Cicero to Lewis Carroll to Queen Latifah-as she asks what a better world would look like if we told our stories with more honest and more hopeful imaginations"-- Provided by publisher.

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