A Family of Strangers

*Total season's marketing budget of $18,000; individual book budget of $3,000 *Newsletter and catalog feature mailed to entire Sarabande database and to Tall's personal contacts *2,000 postcards mailed to MFA programs, bookstores, libraries, and Tall's personal contacts *Press releases and reading copies sent to Jewish contacts from Media Map including Jewish reviewers, award committees, and bookstores *Participation in Book Sense Advanced Access *Participation in CBSD's White Box mailing *Plans to build on publicity contacts garnered from Tall's previous publication of Summons with Sarabande in 2000, including over 20 reading venues and almost a dozen reviewers that supported her last book. *Author tour: Washington, DC; Jacksonville, FL; St. Augustine, FL; Boston, MA; New York, NY; Philadelphia, PA

A lyric essay-cum-memoir uncovering the lost history of a secretive Jewish family.“Without self-absorption, Tall traces the self’s emergence in a place which she recognized from the start as her testing place.”—Seamus Heaney   “In the literature of place, Deborah Tall’s book stands out for its delicacy, range of learning, and refreshing frankness.”—Phillip Lopate   In her third book of nonfiction, Deborah Tall explores the genealogy of the missing. Haunted by her orphaned father’s abandonment by his extended family, his secretive, walled-off trauma and absent history, she sets off in pursuit of the family he claims not to have. From the dutiful happiness of Levittown in the 1950s to a stricken former shtetl in Ukraine, we follow Tall’s journey through evasions and lies. Reflecting on family secrecy, postwar American culture, and the urge for roots, Tall’s search uncovers not just a missing family but an understanding of the part family and history play in identity. A Family of Strangers is Tall’s life’s work, told in such exacting, elegant language that the suppressed past vividly asserts its place in the present.