Conversations with Stalin

De: Eleanor Antin

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

"I never told anybody but comrade Stalin and I were very close friends. For years we used to meet up in Central Park and talk about stuff. My mother would have been jealous so I never told her. I didn’t tell my sister either. She might have turned him in. And my father would have warned me not to mingle with such highfalutin folk. I would only get hurt. So I kept my secret for years. It was fun to have a secret anyway. I was a conspirator. Like the count of Monte Cristo or Jean Valjean."

Eleanor Antin—creator of the world-renowned, picaresque, picture-postcard epic 100 BOOTS, the notorious, conceptual sculpture Carving, the paper-doll, film thriller The Nurse and the Hijackers, and numerous other challenging, mixed-genre artworks—has turned to prose to create a black-comic, coming-of-age memoir with a heroine in the tradition of Holden Caulfield, Huck Finn, Little Orphan Annie, and the irrepressible Dorothy on the road to Oz. Conversations with Stalin is a stand-up, punchy tale of a young girl’s struggle to find her way from her crazy, dysfunctional family of first-generation, Jewish, Stalinist immigrants in her desperate, endearing, often hilarious quest for art, self, revolution, and sex, abetted by a kindly avuncular Joseph Stalin dispensing bizarre advice that almost always “fucks everything up.”