Conversations with Stalin

Antin, Eleanor

ISBN 10: 1557134200 / ISBN 13: 9781557134202

Published by U.S.A.: Green Integer, 2013

About this Item

SIGNED and inscribed on title page--visible in photo. New book that was opened only for signing.

Seller Inventory # 107-071

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Conversations with Stalin
• Publisher: U.S.A.: Green Integer
• Publication Date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1557134200
• ISBN 13: 9781557134202
• Binding: Soft cover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: New
• Signed: Inscribed by Author(s)

About this title

Synopsis

"I never told anybody but comrade Stalin and I were very close friends. For years we used to meet up in Central Park and talk about stuff. My mother would have been jealous so I never told her. I didn’t tell my sister either. She might have turned him in. And my father would have warned me not to mingle with such highfalutin folk. I would only get hurt. So I kept my secret for years. It was fun to have a secret anyway. I was a conspirator. Like the count of Monte Cristo or Jean Valjean."

Eleanor Antin—creator of the world-renowned, picaresque, picture-postcard epic 100 BOOTS, the notorious, conceptual sculpture Carving, the paper-doll, film thriller The Nurse and the Hijackers, and numerous other challenging, mixed-genre artworks—has turned to prose to create a black-comic, coming-of-age memoir with a heroine in the tradition of Holden Caulfield, Huck Finn, Little Orphan Annie, and the irrepressible Dorothy on the road to Oz. Conversations with Stalin is a stand-up, punchy tale of a young girl’s struggle to find her way from her crazy, dysfunctional family of first-generation, Jewish, Stalinist immigrants in her desperate, endearing, often hilarious quest for art, self, revolution, and sex, abetted by a kindly avuncular Joseph Stalin dispensing bizarre advice that almost always “fucks everything up.”

Reviews

Each of Conversations with Stalin’s sixteen anecdote-driven chapters ends in a blaze of magical realism, with protagonist “little Elly” having a rendezvous with the Soviet leader. […] Performance artist that she is, Antin channels Stalinist jargon, from which she derives some moral lesson (or not) regarding her latest misadventure. It’s a fey conceit, but thanks to Antin’ unsentimental portrait of Elly, together with her faux-naïve ability to articulate Stalin’s logic and what might once have been called the party line, it’s actually pretty charming—as are the intermittent pen-and-ink drawings, which reinforce the sense of reading a parodic Popular Front children’s book. —J. Hoberman