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​Jonathan Lerner, writer

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Jonathan Lerner is co-editor of the oral history Voices from Wounded Knee​; author of the novels ​Alex Underground and Caught in a Still Place,  the memoir Swords in the Hands of Children, and the new novel Lily Narcissus, out now from Unsolicited Press. ​He is a longtime contributing editor at Landscape Architecture Magazine where his work addresses the connections between built and natural environments.
 Caught in a Still Place     ​ Alex Underground​​
Voices from Wounded Knee

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"Lily Narcissus is an exceptional read, a beautifully written and well-crafted novel of personal dramas played out in a shadowy Cold War setting. This is literary fiction as it should be: ​intelligent, thought-provoking, and engrossing."
​John Ross, East Asian Review of Books

​​They were going to Asia for two years.

​​Asia beguiled them.
​They never left.

Surrounded by expats and intrigue in Vietnam War era Asia, where the suburban life they knew is just a memory, an American family is irrevocably changed.

​Lily crafts herself a new persona and purpose, eclipsing her diplomat husband. Their kids grow up to play opposing roles in the war. Mysterious Rocky may be Lily's friend, or her lover.
This is the story of a woman who confronts a challenging situation and seizes the chance to powerfully reinvent herself. But in a continent aflame, will her family hold together or whirl apart?
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ORDER FROM UNSOLICITED PRESS
also available from the usual online platforms

​​Review: ​​ An Itinerant Clan's Years in Asia
​"Lily Narcissus is at once intimate family portrait and panoramic world history
​that tracks ​the disastrous consequences of America's involvement
​in Asia in the second half of the 20th century.
With precision and restraint, Lerner illuminates some essential mystery
at the heart of other people and our understanding of them.
​It's beautiful, wise, lucid, and disarming.
​I was seduced, then devastated."

​Andrew Palmer, ​author of The Bachelor

Swords in the Hands of Children

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“Imagine if your favorite uncle, a brutally honest, worldly, self-reflective gay raconteur, had been, as a twenty year-old, a lieutenant in an underground guerrilla army dedicated to the violent overthrow of the government of the United States. Jonathan Lerner is that favorite uncle you never had, telling unbelievable true stories—no bullshit—from the 'revolution' fifty years ago. This is the closest you'll ever get to being there.”

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REVIEW 
​Los Angeles Review of Books

GET YOURS
​Buy Swords in the Hands of Children

LISTEN
Jonathan Lerner on anger and activism
MORE ABOUT
​
​Swords in the Hands of Children

      ARTICLES from 
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Landscape Architecture Magazine
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