A powerful tale of love, friendship, and becoming American in late ’70s Cambridge from the best-selling novelist. Cambridge, 1977: A Harvard graduate student, a Jew from Egypt, is preparing to become the assimilated American professor he longs to be. But when he bonds with a brash, charismatic Arab cab driver nicknamed Kalashnikov, he begins to neglect his studies. Together they carouse the bars and cafés of Cambridge, seduce strangers, ridicule “jumbo-ersatz” America, and skinny-dip in Walden Pond. As final exams approach and the cab driver is threatened with deportation, the grad student faces the decision of his life: whether to cling to his dream of New World assimilation or ditch it all to defend his Old World friend. Sexually charged and enormously moving, this is a deeply American novel of identity and ideals in conflict. It is the book that will seal André Aciman’s reputation as one of the finest writers of our time.
Author
André Aciman was born in Alexandria, Egypt and is an American memoirist, essayist, novelist, and scholar of seventeenth-century literature. He has also written many essays and reviews on Marcel Proust. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, The Paris Review, The New Republic, Condé Nast Traveler as well as in many volumes of The Best American Essays. Aciman received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Harvard University, has taught at Princeton and Bard and is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at The CUNY Graduate Center. He is currently chair of the Ph. D. Program in Comparative Literature and founder and director of The Writers' Institute at the Graduate Center. Aciman is the author of the Whiting Award-winning memoir Out of Egypt (1995), an account of his childhood as a Jew growing up in post-colonial Egypt. Aciman has published two other books: False Papers: Essays in Exile and Memory (2001), and a novel Call Me By Your Name (2007), which was chosen as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and won the Lambda Literary Award for Men's Fiction (2008). His forthcoming novel Eight White Nights (FSG) will be published on February 14, 2010
