- Anntonette Z Alberti
Announcing PolishFestNY Book Club's 2019 Featured Selection!
We are proud to announce that the award winning A Long, Long Time Ago and Essentially True , by Brigid Pasulka, is the featured selection for PolishFestNY 2019 Book Club! Ms. Pasulka will be at PolishFestNY on June 8 and 9 to discuss her novel. PolishFestNY is held at 250 Old Maxwell Road, Latham, NY.
Brigid Pasulka is the descendant of Polish immigrants, born and mostly raised in rural Illinois. She spent a year living in Krakow in the early 90s and has visited many times since then. Her debut novel, A Long, Long Time Ago and Essentially True, won the 2010 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, the Polish American Historical Association Creative Arts Prize, and was a Barnes & Noble Discover selection. It has been translated into six other languages, including Polish (Dawno, Dawno Temu i Prawie Naprawdę). Her second novel, The Sun and Other Stars, is set in Italy. Brigid lives in Chicago with her husband and son and runs the writing center at a public high school.
A Long, Long Time Ago and Essentially True begins on the eve of World War II, in a village tucked into the mountains of southern Poland, where a young man nicknamed Pigeon falls in love with Anielica, a girl fabled for her angelic looks. To court her, Pigeon offers up his "golden hands" to transform her family's modest hut into a beautiful home, thereby building his way into her heart. But the war's arrival cuts short their courtship, delays their marriage and wreaks havoc in all their lives. They manage to survive as part of the resistance, and at the end of the war, leave the village behind for the city of Krakow and the promise of a new life.
Nearly fifty years later, their granddaughter Beata repeats their journey, seeking a new life in the fairy-tale city of her grandmother's stories. But when she arrives in Krakow in the early 1990s, she discovers a city caught between its future and its past, full of struggling pensioners and frustrated youth. Taken in by her tough-talking cousin Irena and Irena's glamorous but irresponsible daughter Magda, Beata struggles to find her own place both in 1990s Krakow and in the constellation of Irena and Magda's fierce relationship. Unexpected tragedies and miracles force Beata to open her eyes to her family's and her country's history, and on the way, she discovers a vision for her own role in the New Poland.
A Long, Long Time Ago and Essentially True weaves together two remarkable stories, re-imagining half a century of Polish history through the legacy of one family.
The book will NOT be for sale at PolishFest so make sure you order it on-line before the festival so that you can have it signed by Ms. Pasulka. You can purchase a copy of A Long, Long Time Ago and Essentially True at Amazon or Indie Bound.
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