SUNY Fredonia: Mary Louise White Reading with Allegra Hyde
The Mary Louise White Visiting Writer Series is bringing Allegra Hyde, author of the novel Eleutheria, to SUNY Fredonia for a reading on September 29th. This event is free and open to the public.
Hyde’s novel Eleutheria is told from the perspective of Willa Marks, the child of survivalists who ends up seeking out an eco-utopian community in the Bahamas called Camp Hope. Her parents taught her to see that the end was coming; as an adult, she believes protest and activism can show the way to a new beginning. Her optimism is complicated, as is her character, and she is frequently disappointed or betrayed by those she looks to for guidance. But the arc of the novel manages to merge her parents’ view of survivalist tactics with utopian ecoactivism and imagines a movement of children that changes the world. It also includes Willa’s complicated romance with Sylvia, a Harvard sociologist, and uses “alternate facts” about the last administration to comment on contemporary politics.
Hyde is also the author of two collections of stories, Of This New World and The Last Catastrophe (forthcoming 2023), which she describes as speculative stories that seek to take on and exaggerate contemporary challenges.
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