Pub Day for Jill Eisenstadt's New Novel "Swell"!

Pub Day for Jill Eisenstadt's New Novel "Swell"!

Jill Eisenstadt '85 (center), flanked by Mattie Horstman '85 and Carolyn Cabral '85 at a literary soirée in New York City circa 1986.

Jill Eisenstadt's new novel Swell is in bookstores today and marks the Bennington author's wholehearted return to the landscape of her first novel From Rockaway (1987). As Eisenstadt explained in a recent profile by the AP, she was “still obsessed with Rockaway all this time, keeping notebooks full of historical research and overheard gossip."

The novel's protagonist, Sue Glassman, is living in Tribeca after September 11th and discovers that she is pregnant with her third child. She moves her family to a beach house in the the Rockaways while the area is undergoing dramatic change—populated by first responders and their families, the community is still trying to pick up the pieces of their lives in the aftermath of this national tragedy. 

Read Eisenstadt's rollicking dialogue with Jonathan Lethem '86 about Bennington's literary culture in the 1980s here and our joint interview with Eisenstadt and her filmmaker sister Debra Eisenstadt (Bennington '91) here.

Congratulations from Literary Bennington to Jill on her pub day!

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