Best of the Backlist Book Club: "World's Fair" by E.L. Doctorow

The Best of the Backlist Book Club is led by Georgia Court, meant for reading what lasts, not just what's latest. January's selection is World's Fair by E.L. Doctorow. A marvelous work from a master storyteller, it's a book about a boy who must surrender his innocence to come of age, and a generation that must survive great hardship to reach its future.

It is 1939, and even as the rumbles of progress are being felt worldwide, New York City clings to remnants of the past, with horse-drawn wagons, street peddlers, and hurdy-gurdy men still toiling in its streets. For nine-year-old Edgar Altschuler, life is stoopball and radio serials, idolizing Joe DiMaggio, and enduring the conflicts between his realist mother and his dreamer of a father. The forthcoming World’s Fair beckons, an amazing vision of American automation, inventiveness, and prosperity—and Edgar Altschuler responds.

We will meet in person at our store location at The Mark, 117 S. Pineapple Ave. The book club is $21, which includes a copy of Housekeeping to be picked up at Bookstore1 any time before our meeting.

PRAISE FOR THE BOOK:

“Something close to magic.”—Los Angeles Times

“World’s Fair is better than a time capsule; it’s an actual slice of a long-ago world, and we emerge from it as dazed as those visitors standing on the corner of the future.”—Anne Tyler

“Doctorow has managed to regain the awed perspective of a child in this novel of rare warmth and intimacy. . . . Stony indeed in the heart that cannot be moved by this book.”—People

“Fascinating . . . exquisitely rendered details of a lost way of life.”—Newsweek

“Wonderful reading.”—USA Today

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

E. L. Doctorow’s works of fiction include Andrew’s Brain, Homer & Langley, The March, Billy Bathgate, Ragtime, The Book of Daniel, City of God, Welcome to Hard Times, Loon Lake, World’s Fair, The Waterworks, and All the Time in the World. Among his honors are the National Book Award, three National Book Critics Circle awards, two PEN/Faulkner awards, and the presidentially conferred National Humanities Medal. In 2009 he was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize, honoring a writer’s lifetime achievement in fiction, and in 2012 he was inducted into the New York State Writers Hall of Fame and won the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction, which is given to an author whose “scale of achievement over a sustained career [places] him in the highest rank of American literature.” In 2013 he received the Gold Medal for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation. Doctorow died in 2015.