Meg Wolitzer

Jonathan Lethem

Dave Eggers

William Finnegan

Neil Gaiman

Anthony Doerr

Salman Rushdie

Lauren Groff

Marlon James

Andrew Sean Greer

Ann Patchett

Brit Bennett

Yaa Gyasi

Sergio De La Pava

Aleksandar Hemon

George Saunders

Rabih Alameddine

Jesmyn Ward

Michael Cunningham

Jennifer Egan

Louise Erdrich

Morgan Parker

Jacqueline Woodson

Steven Okazaki

Geraldine Brooks

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Scott Turow

Timothy Egan

Victor Lavalle

Moses Sumney

Moriel Rothman-Zecher

Adrian Nicole LeBlanc

Hector Tobar

Li Yiyun

Elizabeth Strout

C.J. Anders

Brenda J. Childs

David Handler

To mark its 100-year anniversary, the American Civil Liberties Union partners with award-winning authors Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman to bring together many of our greatest living writers, each contributing an original piece inspired by a historic ACLU case. On January 19, 1920, a small group of idealists and visionaries, including Helen Keller, Jane Addams, Roger Baldwin, and Crystal Eastman, founded the American Civil Liberties Union. A century after its creation, the ACLU remains the nation’s premier defender of the rights and freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution. In collaboration with the ACLU, authors Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman have curated an anthology of essays about landmark cases in the organization’s one-hundred-year history. Fight of the Century takes you inside the trials and the stories that have shaped modern life. Some of the most prominent cases that the ACLU has been involved in—Brown v. Board of Education, Roe v. Wade, Miranda v. Arizona—need little introduction. Others you may never even have heard of, yet their outcomes quietly defined the world we live in now. Familiar or little-known, each case springs to vivid life in the hands of the acclaimed writers who dive into the history, narrate their personal experiences, and debate the questions at the heart of each issue. Hector Tobar introduces us to Ernesto Miranda, the felon whose wrongful conviction inspired the now-iconic Miranda rights—which the police would later read to the man suspected of killing him. Yaa Gyasi confronts the legacy of Brown v. Board of Education, in which the ACLU submitted a friend of- the-court brief questioning why a nation that has sent men to the moon still has public schools so unequal that they may as well be on different planets. True to the ACLU’s spirit of principled dissent, Scott Turow offers a blistering critique of the ACLU’s stance on campaign finance. These powerful stories, along with essays from Neil Gaiman, Meg Wolitzer, Salman Rushdie, Ann Patchett, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Louise Erdrich, George Saunders, and many more, remind us that the issues the ACLU has engaged over the past one hundred years remain as vital as ever today, and that we can never take our liberties for granted. Chabon and Waldman are donating their advance to the ACLU and the contributors are forgoing payment.

Writers Reflect on 100 Years of Landmark ACLU Cases

Fight of the Century

Casi is a hotshot public defender working on the front line of America's War on Drugs. So far he's on the winning side. He's never lost a case. But nothing lasts forever, and pride like his has a long way to fall. Funny, smart and always surprising, A Naked Singularity speaks a language all of its own and reads like nothing else ever written. Casi's beautiful mind and planetary intelligence make him an inimitable and unforgettable narrator. In De La Pava's hands, the labyrinthine miseries of the New York Justice System are as layered and diabolical as Dante's nine circles of Hell. But the Devil doesn't hog the best lines. There are plenty here to go around.

A Naked Singularity

Every Arc Bends Its Radian

"Ambitious, affecting, intelligent, plangent, comic, kooky and impassioned. I've read a lot of novels this year, between judging the Man Booker prize and the Granta Best of Young British Novelists, and I've yearned for this kind of exuberant, precise fiction" Stuart Kelly, Guardian on A Naked Singularity It would take something huge to put Paterson, New Jersey on the map. But Nina Gill is determined to do just that. She is the daughter of the ageing owner of the Dallas Cowboys and the well-kept secret to their success. Shocked when her brother inherits the team, leaving her with the Paterson Pork, New Jersey's only Indoor Football League franchise, she vows to take on the N.F.L. and make her new team the pigskin kings of America. Meanwhile, Nuno DeAngeles - a brilliant criminal mastermind - contrives to be thrown into Rikers Island prison to commit one of the most audacious crimes of all time. Now he's on the inside, he has two good reasons to get out. But how does a person of culture go about breaking out of the penal system when the whole of the land of the free is addicted to keeping him in it? Without knowing it, or ever having met, Nina and Nuno have already had a profound effect on each other's lives. As his bid for freedom and her bid for sporting immortality reach crisis point, their stories converge in the countdown to an epic conclusion. Thrilling, touching, insightful and shockingly hilarious, De La Pava's extraordinary novel gets under the skin and into the minds of a vast cast of characters from the fringes of society - immigrants, exiles and outsiders.

Lost Empress

A Novel

Naked Singularity

Sergio De La Pava’s A Naked Singularity was one of the most highly praised debut novels in decades. The Wall Street Journal called it “a propulsive, mind-bending experience,” and named it one of the ten best books of the year. The Toronto Star did the same, calling it “a great American novel: large, ambitious, and full of talk.” In Slate, Paul Ford proclaimed,“It’s a fine thing for an author to bring forth something so unapologetically maximalist.” This book is nothing like that one. Just look at it: A Naked Singularity was a brick of a book, 678 pages, and this one’s slim--lean and focused. A Naked Singularity locked us into the unforgettable voice of its protagonist, Casi, while Personae shimmers and shifts among different perspectives, locations, and narrative techniques. But sharp readers will quickly see that the two books are the work of the same hand. The sheer energy of De La Pava’s sentences, his eye for absurd humor, his commitment to the idea of justice--all will be familiar here as they carry us from the tale of an obsessive, damaged psychic detective consumed by a murder case, into a Sartrean drama that raises questions (and jokes) about responsibility, fate, death, and more. And when De La Pava eventually returns us to the investigation, this time seen from the other side, the lives and deaths bound up in it feel all the more real, and moving, even as solid answers slip away into mist. Shelf Awareness declared that A Naked Singularity "heralded the arrival of a tremendous talent." In some ways, despite its brevity, Personae is even more surprising and challenging--and, in its ambition and fierce intelligence, it’s proof that Sergio De La Pava is here to stay.

Personae

La vida de una brillante detective y la obra de un dramaturgo asesinado convergen en una reflexión en torno al destino, la justicia, el arte y la muerte Sergio de la Pava es una de las revelaciones de las letras Latinoamericanas en Estados Unidos, gracias a su trabajo y su talento ya se ha destacado como una de las figuras literarias del momento. Las misteriosas circunstancias que rodean la muerte de un hombre muy viejo, recién acaecida en un minúsculo apartamento de Manhattan, exigen la presencia de Helen Tame, una brillante detective obsesionada con la verdad. Pronto la mujer descubre en el lugar una caja y dentro de ella diversos textos, una serie de creaciones y apuntes heterogéneos de Antonio Arce, el escritor que acaba de morir, y se sienta a leerlos. El resultado (de la lectura, de su investigación) es este poderoso libro, una novela peculiar en la que se va a la caza de una muerte, sí, pero más que nada de la vida, de sus grandes preguntas, del arte, del amor, de la libertad creativa. Sergio De La Pava's A Naked Singularity was one of the most highly praised debut novels in decades. The Wall Street Journal called it "a propulsive, mind-bending experience," and named it one of the ten best books of the year. The Toronto Star did the same, calling it "a great American novel: large, ambitious, and full of talk." In Slate, Paul Ford proclaimed,"It's a fine thing for an author to bring forth something so unapologetically maximalist." This book is nothing like that one. Just look at it: A Naked Singularity was a brick of a book, 678 pages, and this one's slim--lean and focused. A Naked Singularity locked us into the unforgettable voice of its protagonist, Casi, while Personae shimmers and shifts among different perspectives, locations, and narrative techniques. ENGLISH DESCRIPTION Personae begins with the investigation of a crime: Detective Helen Tame arrives at a Manhattan apartment where Antonio Arce, over a century old, has died. She eventually acquires Arce's notebook, and in due time we read the impressionistic memoir at its heart, but only after meandering through excerpts from Tame's scholarly paper on Bach and Glenn Gould, a short story about swimming out to sea, a two-act Beckettian play, Tame's explanation of Arce's death and two obituaries. The book's final 50 pages -- Arce's memoir -- take us from a suicide mission in the jungles of Colombia to a love story in New York City and feature some of the finest writing of De La Pava's burgeoning career.

Sergio De La Pava

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