Please join us as Rebecca introduces and discusses her new novel "The Promise Of A New Life". The Marlborough, NH author of two poetry collections presents her debut novel, so evocative of life as lived that it transports you to a time and place you can practically see, touch, and feel. The unnamed narrator is a fiercely observant, introverted Jewish-American girl who seems to exist in a private and separate realm. She's the child of a first-generation doctor and lawyer--whose own stories have the loud grandeur of family legend--in an America where Jews are excluded from the country club across the street. Her expectations for adulthood are often contradictory. In the changing landscape of the 1960s, she attempts to find her way through the rituals of life, her geography expanding across the country, across the ocean, and into multiple nations.
Along the way, she meets a glamorous hairdresser on a cruise ship to Israel, loopy tarot-card-reading passengers, and Alice-in-Wonderland lawyers in Haifa. There's a blue-eyed all-American college boyfriend, a mystified tourist agent in the Lofoten Islands, a handsome eligible rabbi in LA, a righteous and self-absorbed MIT professor, and a clandestine, calculating lover in Boston. Eventually, she finds her own compass, but only after being swept to several distant shores by many winds.
"The Promise of a Normal Life, with its arresting beauty and candor relayed in lapidary prose, keeps reminding us that its author is a poet. Rebecca Kaiser Gibson has delivered a novel to treasure."--Jonathan Wilson, author of A Palestine Affair
Rebecca Kaiser Gibson was selected as a Fulbright Scholar to teach poetry in Hyderabad, India, in 2011. She is founder and director of The Loom, Poetry in Harrisville, a poetry reading series. Her poems have appeared in The Adroit Journal; Agni; Field; The Greensboro Review; Green Mountain Review; The Harvard Review; Ocean State Review;Poems2Go; Salamander; Slate; The Poetry Porch; The Taos Journal of International Poetry and Art; The Tupelo Quarterly, been featured on Verse Daily, and included in two anthologies, Cadence of Hooves, and The Best of Tupelo Press 30/30 Project's First Year. Gibson previously taught poetry at Tufts University for 23 years.
