KGB Bar

British author FRANCIS SPUFFORD will read from his exhilarating new genre-bending novel, RED PLENTY. Following the reading, Spufford will be in conversation with A Public Space founding editor Brigid Hughes. This event is free and open to the public (ages 21+). Doors open at 7:00 PM. Books will be available for purchase.

PRAISE FOR RED PLENTY:

“Spufford, who has succeeded in turning possibly the least promising fictional material of all time into an incredibly smart, surprisingly involving and deeply eccentric book, a hammer-and-sickle version of Altman’s Nashville, with central committees replacing country music. . . . I am not alone in thinking that he has one of the most original minds in contemporary literature.”
—Nick Hornby, The Believer

“After making splash in England, Spufford’s newest novel is likely to do the same in the U.S. If you think that a novel about the planned economy of the USSR from the 1950s through the 1970s would be boring, think again. . . . By teetering delicately between history and fiction, the novel leaves readers with a sense of the period that could not have been achieved with a straight, factual approach.”—Booklist

“Though the intricacies of Soviet central planning may seem an unlikely topic for a work of historical fiction, Spufford succeeds at distilling the dismal science into a page-turner and using the unconventional vehicles of linear planning, cybernetics, communal agricultural policy, and exposition on the respective merits of Marx and Hayek (buttressed by extensive footnotes) to explore the entire range of human emotion. . . . Extensively researched and both convincing and compelling in its idiosyncrasies . . . this genre-bending book surprised in many ways.”
—Publishers Weekly

ABOUT RED PLENTY:

Strange as it may seem, the gray, oppressive USSR was founded on a fairytale. It was built on the twentieth-century magic called “the planned economy,” which was going to gush forth an abundance of good things that the lands of capitalism could never match. And for just a little while, in the heady years of the late 1950s, the magic seemed to be working.

Red Plenty is about that moment in history, and how it came, and how it went away; about the brief era when, under the rash leadership of Khrushchev, the Soviet Union looked forward to a future of rich communists and envious capitalists, when Moscow would out-glitter Manhattan and every Lada would be better engineered than a Porsche. It’s about the scientists who did their genuinely brilliant best to make the dream come true, to give the tyranny its happy ending.
Red Plenty is history, it’s fiction, it’s as ambitious as Sputnik, as uncompromising as an Aeroflot flight attendant, and as different from what you were expecting as a glass of Soviet champagne.

Francis Spufford was born in 1964, meaning that he grew up with the USSR as a seemingly permanent feature of the planet. Red Plenty is, among other things, an attempt to understand that vanished world. Two of his previous books have been published in the United States, I May Be Some Time, about the tragedy of the Antarctic explorer Robert Scott, and The Child That Books Built, a memoir of a childhood as a compulsive reader. He lives near Cambridge, England.

Brigid Hughes is the founding editor of A Public Space. Previously,she was executive editor at The Paris Review. She received the 2011 PEN/Nora Magid Award for Editing. Francis Spufford’s work appeared in A Public Space Issue 11.

Review copies, author photographs, and interviews available upon request.