New Dominion Bookshop will host a book reading and signing with local author Jennifer Niesslein on Saturday, March 5, from 7 -8 p.m.
Niesslein will be reading from her new book, Dreadful Sorry: Essays on an American Nostalgia, which will be released from Belt Publishing this coming March.
This event will be cosponsored by local nonprofit WriterHouse and will be free to attend and open to the public. The bookshop recommends arriving early for the best seating.
Dreadful Sorry offers candid essays on personal and cultural American nostalgia, focusing on the author’s working-class, Rust Belt family history.
What does it mean to be nostalgic for the American past? The feeling has been co-opted by the far right (“Make America Great Again,” after all, is a plea for the past), and associated with violent periods of our country’s history when white supremacy was even more dominant than today. Can a liberal white woman still be sentimental about her childhood, her European immigrant family history, her working-class upbringing?
In Dreadful Sorry, Niesslein explores her “nostalgia problem” with grace and curiosity. The essays recount her thoughts upon rewatching Little Women with her sisters and mother, her hand-to-mouth childhood, the effect being “not the right kind of white” had on her Polish immigrant ancestors in the U.S, and her family’s own racism.
Niesslein weaves together personal and structural questions of class, whiteness, history, and family with humor and charisma.
This is a book for anyone who wants to think about their relationship to their childhood, family history, and place.
Niesslein is the editor of Full Grown People as well as the editor of two Full Grown People anthologies. She wrote one memoir, Practically Perfect in Every Way (Putnam, 2007), and cofounded Brain, Child magazine. Originally from western Pennsylvania, she lives in Charlottesville.
Located in Historic Downtown Charlottesville, New Dominion is a general trade bookshop that serves as the hub for readings and other literary events in the community.
For more information, visit ndbookshop.com.
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