About the book, from the publisher:
How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?Visit Andrew Ridker's website.
Hope, as a title, serves two primary functions. For one, it situates the novel in historical context: the book is set during Barack Obama’s second term, at a time when the optimism that propelled him into office had begun to wane. Though most of the story unfolds in 2013, I approached it like a work of historical fiction. Trump, Covid, and #MeToo, among other catastrophes, hang over the novel like a ghostly epilogue.
With a title as brief and abstract as Hope, I knew it needed a powerful image accompanying it. The photograph that I found for the cover, Bat Mitzvah Dance, Chicago, IL by Melissa Ann Pinney, fills in the specifics that a single word can’t. Comedy, tragedy, family, ambition, Jewishness, the pains of growing up: the title and the...[read on]
Q&A with Andrew Ridker.
--Marshal Zeringue
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