A Crowded Loneliness

LIMITED EDITION E-BOOK EXCLUSIVE! A Crowded Loneliness documents the thoughts of one mind in isolation and may mirror the emotions of many others.

Set in Havana during the Cuban Revolution and in the Deep South before and during the Civil Rights Movement, A Crowded Loneliness, is based on the true story of Bienvenida Catalina Miranda. Her family worked closely with Fidel Castro to overthrown the dictator Fulgencio Batista, until Castro announced that he was a communist. After her brother’s arrest and her father’s death, 9-year-old Catalina and her 11-year-old brother, Mario, took part in Operation Peter Pan—a mass exodus of over 14,000 unaccompanied Cuban children to the United States between 1960 and 1962. They boarded a plane to Miami with little more than the clothes on their backs. A week later, the dark-skinned Catalina and Mario found themselves separated and shipped off to orphanages in New Orleans—in the Jim Crow South. A Crowded Loneliness is a moving story about a family torn by politics and about a young girl’s struggle to adapt and her courage to never let go of her dreams.

“What does it mean to be lonely?” Thomas Dumm asks. His inquiry, documented in this book, takes us beyond social circumstances and into the deeper forces that shape our very existence as modern individuals. The modern individual, Dumm suggests, is fundamentally a lonely self. Through reflections on philosophy, political theory, literature, and tragic drama, he proceeds to illuminate a hidden dimension of the human condition. His book shows how loneliness shapes the contemporary division between public and private, our inability to live with each other honestly and in comity, the estranged forms that our intimate relationships assume, and the weakness of our common bonds. A reading of the relationship between Cordelia and her father in Shakespeare’s King Lear points to the most basic dynamic of modern loneliness—how it is a response to the problem of the “missing mother.” Dumm goes on to explore the most important dimensions of lonely experience—Being, Having, Loving, and Grieving. As the book unfolds, he juxtaposes new interpretations of iconic cultural texts—Moby-Dick, Death of a Salesman, the film Paris, Texas, Emerson’s “Experience,” to name a few—with his own experiences of loneliness, as a son, as a father, and as a grieving husband and widower. Written with deceptive simplicity, Loneliness as a Way of Life is something rare—an intellectual study that is passionately personal. It challenges us, not to overcome our loneliness, but to learn how to re-inhabit it in a better way. To fail to do so, this book reveals, will only intensify the power that it holds over us.

Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism #1 Book of the Year from Brain Pickings Named a best book of the year by NPR, Newsweek, Slate, Pop Sugar, Marie Claire, Elle, Publishers Weekly, and Lit Hub A dazzling work of biography, memoir, and cultural criticism on the subject of loneliness, told through the lives of iconic artists, by the acclaimed author of The Trip to Echo Spring. When Olivia Laing moved to New York City in her mid-thirties, she found herself inhabiting loneliness on a daily basis. Increasingly fascinated by the most shameful of experiences, she began to explore the lonely city by way of art. Moving from Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks to Andy Warhol’s Time Capsules, from Henry Darger’s hoarding to David Wojnarowicz’s AIDS activism, Laing conducts an electric, dazzling investigation into what it means to be alone, illuminating not only the causes of loneliness but also how it might be resisted and redeemed. Humane, provocative, and moving, The Lonely City is a celebration of a strange and lovely state, adrift from the larger continent of human experience, but intrinsic to the very act of being alive.