Burn

By Jennifer Natalya Fink

June 1, 1953. A mute, naked boy appears in the garden of Sylvia Edelman: messy housewife, reluctant communist, and expert tomato gardener. Only a dog tag dangling from his neck identifies him: Simon. Is he a government agent, a runaway teenager, or a robot planted to persecute Sylvia and her tomatoes?

Set amidst the sexual and political repression of the 1950s, Burn tells the story of the flamboyant Sylvia Edelman, Simon, and Sylvan Lake, a socialist Jewish colony in northern Westchester. Burn revisits familiar narratives of McCarthyism, Jewish socialism, and pedophilia, but from the rarely heard perspective of a menopausal immigrant woman.

A fable for the Bush/Rumsfeld era, a rewriting of the Adam and Eve myth, Burn will scorch the reader with its Faulkneresque tale of tomatoes, torture, and tangled love.