Diane Simmons "Dreams Like Thunder" w/Helen Fremont 4/5/25 - Boston Store

East End Books Boston Seaport presents: Diane Simmons "Dreams Like Thunder" w/Helen Fremont After Long Silence and The Escape Artist.

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Originally published by Story Line Press in 1992, Winner of the 1993 Oregon Book Award, Dreams Like Thunder is now reissued by Red Hen.

Set in 1959 Eastern Oregon, Dreams Like Thunder tells the story of an unsophisticated farmgirl, the impending visit of her worldly cousin, and her discovery of the violence perpetrated by her forebears upon which her placid existence rests. Winner of the 1993 Oregon Book Award, Dreams Like Thunder is a beautifully written coming-of-age story.

PRAISE FOR THE BOOK:

“Dreams Like Thunder tells the story of Alberta, the ten-year-old heir of a small Eastern Oregon farm, and the impending visit of "sophisticated" relatives who have lived in Japan. Although it is 1959, Alberta's family seems more in touch with the myth of their own pioneer past than the 20th century. Diane Simmons's gift for storytelling is solidly based on the ability to describe both characters and background while she weaves her storyteller's spell, capturing the imagination of the reader.” -- Midwest Book Review

“Simmons has the measure of her setting . . . in this thoroughly enjoyable, unpretentious second novel.” —The New York Times

“Direct yet subtle, Dreams Like Thunder, is really about leave-taking. Alberta is going to leave the land that has imprisoned her family. . . and be haunted for the rest of her life. . . by the legend that is shaping her even as she rejects it.” —Los Angeles Times

“The young girl, the storyteller, is perfectly imagined. Our country’s West, the ranchers, the deliberately drowned Chinese, the struggling miners, the struggling farm are lightly drawn but the fierceness and cruelty are there.” —Grace Paley, finalist Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, finalist National Book Award.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

A Westerner--descendent of pioneers on the Oregon trail and raised in the high desert of Eastern Oregon—Diane Simmons earned a BA in history from the University of Oregon Honors College. After working as a newspaper reporter for several years in Oregon, Idaho, Washington, and Alaska, she moved to New York City, where she earned an MA in creative writing, and a PhD in English literature. Diane is professor emerita at City University of New York and recently served as a Fulbright Teaching Fellow in the Czech Republic. She has authored numerous works of award-winning fiction, non-fiction, journalism, and criticism including her 2016 non-fiction The Courtship of Eva Eldridge: A Story of Bigamy in the Marriage Mad Fifties, reissued as an Audible Audiobook in 2024. Diane resides in Maplewood, New Jersey.

HELEN FREMONT, a lawyer and writer, was raised Roman Catholic by her Eastern European emigre parents. It was not until she was thirty-five that she discovered that her parents were, in fact, Jewish Holocaust survivors. The story of her parents’ survival of the Soviet and Nazi occupations, as well as her own efforts to piece together her family’s hidden identity is recorded in her memoir, After Long Silence, published by Delacorte in 1999 (now available from Penguin Random House). A national bestseller and Featured Alternate of the Book of the Month Club, the book has been published in England and Germany. It was selected by as a “New and Noteworthy” book in 2000.

Her critically acclaimed new memoir, The Escape Artist, was selected as a “Editor’s Choice” new book in 2020. It was also recommended as one of the “Best New Books” by Magazine in 2020, and named it a “Reader’s Choice” book of 2020.

Host or Publisher East End Books Ptown