Allegra Hyde’s debut story collection, Of This New World, won the John Simmons Short Fiction Award through the Iowa Short Fiction Award Series. Her stories and essays have appeared in The Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, The Best Small Fictions, and The Best American Travel Writing. Originally from New Hampshire, she currently lives in Ohio and teaches at Oberlin College.
Hyde's new novel is Eleutheria.
At Electric Lit she tagged eight books that "offer us opportunities to reflect on what a better world could look like, as well as why that world doesn’t exist." One title on the list:
Arcadia by Lauren GroffRead about the other entries on the list.
It was tempting to included Groff’s latest novel, Matrix, which surely has utopian vibes, but Arcadia is a classic. Set at a hippie commune in upstate New York, the novel opens in the 1960s with a haze of free love and an abundance of tofu. But the paradise can’t last forever, nor can it serve all of its constituents the same way—especially the children of the community’s founding adults, who had no say in the circumstances of their upbringing. A depiction of going back-to-the-land that ultimately surges forward to an imagined present, this novel considers the long-term impacts of a hippie experiment.
Arcadia is on Emma Straub's top ten list of books that mimic the feeling of a summer vacation, Ewan Morrison's top ten list of books about communes, and Jami Attenberg's top ten list of dysfunctional families in literature.
The Page 69 Test: Arcadia.
--Marshal Zeringue
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