race, wealth, art, Atlanta, crash
Book summary:
On a humid summer day, the phones begin to ring: disaster has struck. Chateau de Sully, a Boeing 707 chartered to ferry home more than one hundred of Atlanta’s most prominent citizens from a European jaunt, crashed in Paris shortly after takeoff. It is the second-deadliest disaster in the history of aviation. Overnight, the city of Atlanta changes.
Left behind are children, spouses, lovers, and friends faced with renegotiating their lives. Robert, a newspaper editor, must decide if he can reconnect with his beloved but estranged wife, whose swindler parents have left her penniless. Nineteen-year-old Piedmont Dobbs, recently denied admission to an integrated school, senses a moment of uncertain opportunity. And Mayor Ivan Allen is tasked with the job of moving Atlanta forward – the hedonism of the 60s and the urgency of the Civil Rights movement at his city’s doorstep.
Visible Empire is the story of a husband and wife who can’t begin to understand each other until chaos drives them to clarity. It’s a story of the promise and hope that remain in the wake of crisis.
Publisher:
Houghton Mifflin
Praise:
Quote:
"Captivating...[Pittard] brings her kaleidoscopic perspective to a catastrophe on an epic scale...With her keen eye for social markers and a deft weave of intersecting storylines, Pittard exposes social fissures and tensions over race and class, and how power and privilege play out in the shadows of grief."
Credit:
Los Angeles Times
Quote:
“Pittard’s novel combines a sense of personal loss and turmoil with greater societal change as the civil rights movement arrives at its peak.”
Credit:
New York Times Book Review, A New & Noteworthy selection
Quote:
"Pittard’s earlier novels [...] established her as a formidable writer. The prose in Visible Empire [...] remains assured, polished, readable, and she renders a 1962 Atlanta that is vivid and just-enough interconnected. Ultimately, Pittard shoulders the burden of history with responsibility and resolve, and a brave imagination."
Credit:
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Quote:
"On June 3, 1962, a flight carrying more than 100 of Atlanta's wealthiest residents crashed on takeoff from Paris. Pittard's kaleidoscopic novel, a fictionalized account of that disaster and its aftermath, illuminates the personal and communal grief (and, in some cases, wicked delight) of those left behind."
Credit:
the Oprah Magazine, "Top Books of Summer"
Bio:
Short bio:
Hannah Pittard is the author of four novels, including Listen to Me (a New York Times Editors' Choice) and Visible Empire (a New York Times "New & Noteworthy" selection). She is winner of the 2006 Amanda Davis Highwire Fiction Award, a MacDowell Colony Fellow, recipient of a 2018 Kentucky Arts Council Al Smith Individual Artist Fellowship, and a consulting editor for Narrative Magazine. Her work has appeared in the Sewanee Review, the New York Times, and other publications. She is a professor of English at the University of Kentucky, where she directs the MFA program in creative writing.
A&S department affiliation:
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