Peter de Lissovoy

Peter de Lissovoy attended Harvard University and spent fifteen months in Africa working as a reporter in Rhodesia and teaching with a Harvard project in Tanzania. In Rhodesia, he joined the youth wing of the Zimbabwe African National Union, out of which experience came the novel Angels of Zimbabwe, set in pre-revolutionary Zimbabwe still under control of the white settler state. He was expelled from South Africa for interviewing banned ANC leader Chief Albert Luthuli, and having to flee southern Africa, he hitch-hiked from Cape Town to Cairo with some other political refugees from the Republic. In the U.S., he was a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and was jailed several times in southwest Georgia, where he lived for two years during the Civil Rights Movement in the 60s and wrote Feelgood: A Trip in Time and Out, a novel about the Civil Rights Movement and life and work on the black side of a small Georgia town exploring what might have happened if the civil rights movement had failed. In our present time this story unfortunately remains very relevant. He is coauthor and editor of The Great Pool Jump, a nonfiction collection of reminiscences about the Civil Rights Movement in south Georgia and elsewhere. During the 1970s de Lissovoy ran a car shop specializing in restoring old Volvos in Oakland, California, and for several years roamed around as a free-lance car dealer, from which comes his novel The Invisible Car Dealer, which among other things explores the meanings of American liberty and freedom. De Lissovoy has taught English and writing at Harvard University Extension School and lives in northern New Hampshire with his wife, dogs, ducks, and horses.

His novel Wisconsin is set on the streets of Chicago and in a fictional far northern midwestern town experiencing a high-tech boom of the sort that has a criminal side. It is about people, especially a lost young woman, searching for their freedom. In the 1980s he drove cabs in Chicago. Below is the back cover blurb and some reviews. Wisconsin is now a trilogy. The second novel is Rita and "the Armchair" available on Amazon, more cop and taxi stories dealing with race relations on the street. The third novel in the Wisconsin trilogy will be published in 2025.

“Like the cop, the cab driver was about to have his world disturbed by a strange girl. But being a weak denizen of the city jungle, the cab driver must have a very different first impression of Rita than a cop, who by function as well as by nature is a predatory creature. As unlikely as it must have been, from alien planes, and miles apart, inhabiting nearly polar ends of the urban wilderness, shortly these two would get to know each other, as guys do, that is, mix their misperceptions of each other dramatically and violently. It was the last thing Rita would have wished to happen, although women are often judged as aiming to create conflict and confusion. She had plenty of problems of her own. . . .”

From one review: "This is one taxi ride you don't want to miss."

From another review of Wisconsin:

"Three characters - Shooter, a black Chicago cop, Bobby the Fist, his old high school nemesis and now an aging gangbanger, and Cadillac, a contemplative, romantic cab driver - become embroiled in a feckless drug deal initiated by Rita, a young woman trying to escape the snare of a thoroughly corrupt and deeply evil industrialist. Their involvement over the course of a long, hot Chicago day and night is alternately comic, tragic, and ultimately redemptive, as their assumptions about themselves and one another are repeatedly peeled away. De Lissovoy spins this complex tale through the alternating points of view of the four main characters, as they attempt to escape the demons of their respective - and very American - histories, and to find freedom and love, neither of which they understand very well at all at the novel’s beginning. Their encounters with themselves, with each other, and with the remnants of the natural world in Chicago’s suburban sprawl are deeply and compassionately imagined."