Amerikaland

by Danny Goodman

Overview

In a reimagined present day, Sabine, a guarded, independent German tennis player, and Sandy, a Brooklyn-born Jewish baseball player, find themselves in New York City for World Day-a sporting event meant to celebrate international peace.

For years, Sabine was regarded as a tennis legend until an act of violence threatened her life and career. Now, she is determined to stand before the crowds once again a winner. Sandy is the beloved star of his hometown team, but a recent horrific antisemitic crime nearly unravels him.

Their lives are forever changed when a massive terrorist attack strikes World Day. As Sabine and Sandy emerge from this destruction, their journeys take them across the Atlantic and back again, where they come to understand how they are each connected to the attack-connections veiled by shocking family secrets and geopolitical motivations. After these revelations, they'll have to decide if their love and friendship can bridge a path forward.

In striking resonance with today's rising antisemitism, AMERIKALAND tells the emotional story of people battling their histories and charting their own fates.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798985107067
Publisher:	Leftover Books
Publication date:	06/04/2024
Pages:	286
Sales rank:	214,832
Product dimensions:	5.25(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.64(d)

About the Author

Danny Goodman's writing has appeared in various publications, and he was the recipient of a writer-in-residence fellowship from Rivendell. He earned his MFA in Fiction from the University of New Orleans, where he was a two-time winner of the Samuel Mockbee Award. He lives in the Hudson Valley with his wife, a book editor, and their editorial cats. AMERIKALAND is his debut novel.

Editorial Reviews

2024-01-11
Goodman’s novel presents a vision of a grim American future in which two professional athletes confront escalating waves of discrimination.

The novel’s panoramic opening evokes that of Don DeLillo’s Underworld(1997) with its sweeping survey of the assembled audience for World Day, an international day of peace featuring an athletic competition held in New York City that’s reminiscent of the Olympics. Among the participating athletes are Sabine Hellewege, a native German and seasoned tennis star, and Sandy Katzmann, a Jewish American hometown hero and the shortstop for the local Brooklyn baseball team. Both are recovering from recent tragic events; Sabine was shot midmatch a few months ago by a mysterious assailant in Budapest, Hungary, and Sandy recently came home to find a dead Jewish boy he didn’t know on his doorstep, “battered and bloodied” and with the Yiddish word fortraitoretched across his back in charcoal. Both are hoping for a return to normalcy on World Day, but it’s not to be; they and the assembled fans are instead met with sudden “light bombs,” which crumble the stadiums and kill over 120,000 people. Goodman effectively describes the scene with a choral we: “The concrete and earth beneath us give way. We are reduced. And when there is nothing left of our bodies, we become the air.” Later referred to as “the Event,” the catastrophic attack further alters the trajectories of Sabine’s and Sandy’s lives. During these middle passages of recovery, the author deftly reveals the characters’ backstories in controlled reflections on their parents and their own shifting understanding of their places in the world. After grounding readers this way, Goodman picks up the pace considerably in the novel’s second half. Once the characters reunite in Berlin and Sabine is kidnapped, the twists come quickly in tense scenes that escalate earlier threats of violence. In his intertwining of personal tragedies with broader social issues, Goodman presents an unnerving picture of a world that seems not so far away.

A contemplative, richly imagined, and occasionally thrilling exploration of the near future.

Kirkus Reviews