Wednesday, February 6, at 6pm, a reading, discussion and book signing with Andrew Furman, author of GOLDENS ARE HERE.
Inspired by true events surrounding an historic Florida citrus season and the civil rights struggle, GOLDENS ARE HERE offers a glimpse of the sea changes occurring in Florida and the nation in the 1960s through the prism of one family’s negotiations with the land, their neighbors, and each other.
It’s 1961, and everything is changing in Florida. Jim Crow strains to maintain its hold, the Cold War escalates, the US space program hits its stride, and the Jewish Goldens—determined to begin a new pastoral life along Florida’s central east coast—are just trying to hold on to their small orange grove near the excitement of Cape Canaveral.
In GOLDENS ARE HERE, Andrew Furman imagines with great empathy the individual members of the Golden family, their unique struggles and dreams, during a single tumultuous citrus season. Isaac Golden must reckon between his ambition to create the perfect fruit and the business realities bearing down upon him given the booming postwar demand for cheap frozen concentrate. His beautiful wife, Melody, finds herself testing the boundaries that had so clearly governed her more conventional life in suburban Philadelphia, and their chronically ill son, Eli, wishes only to muster his strength so that he might enjoy the wide-open outdoors and see a bobcat.
Andrew Furman is a professor of English at Florida Atlantic University and teaches in its creative writing MFA program. He is the author of the environmental memoir Bitten: My Unexpected Love Affair with Florida (2014), which was named a Finalist for the ASLE Environmental Book Award, and My Los Angeles in Black and (Almost) White (2010). His fiction and creative nonfiction frequently engages with the Florida outdoors, but he has also written about Jewish identity, basketball, lighthouses, swimming, and cast-iron cookware. He lives in south Florida.
Praise for GOLDENS ARE HERE:
“Andrew Furman’s GOLDENS ARE HERE is a smart, generous, and engrossing look at the Civil Rights struggle in Florida. A fascinating meditation on what it means to be a neighbor in a highly unjust world.” —Gary Shteyngart, author of Super Sad True Love Story and Little Failure
“‘There was something glorious about an examination with a stethoscope,’ muses Isaac Golden, the searching, hopeful patriarch in Andrew Furman’s novel, GOLDENS ARE HERE. ‘This laying on of hands. This reverent silence. . . . Here was the real, Isaac thought.’ Readers looking for the real will find it in Furman’s careful attunement to place (tamarind, lantana, wax myrtle; Parson Brown, Hamlin, Valencia) and time (the Space Age and the Civil Rights struggle.) Furman gives this moment in our collective history its due with nuance, warmth, and a palpable sense of family grief and love.”
—Joni Tevis, author of The World Is On Fire: Scrap, Treasure, and Songs of Apocalypse