Russ Rymer Selected Works

"First we had segregation. Then integration. Then disintegration." —resident, American Beach.

Avoiding the easy clichés of victimhood and oppression, award-winning journalist Russ Rymer brings to life the stark conflict between whites and blacks in the United States today. Through three connected lives in and around northeast Florida's black resort town of American Beach—an unarmed black motorist killed by a white policeman; the great-grandfather of Florida's first black millionaire, who lives on the beach with next to nothing; and prominent Harlem Renaissance writer Zora Neale Hurston—Rymer presents a vision of a nation where the futures of both races are as linked as their histories, where the lost record of heroic black enterprise and prominence offers a key to the struggles of every modern American.

An account of one young woman's emergence from a tragic childhood describes how, after spending her early years trapped in a chair in a closed room, Genie learned to walk, chew, and speak, with the help of the scientists who adopted her. As the scientists study her, hoping to gain new insight into language acquisition and development, the book raises questions about the line between aid and exploitation.

Matilde Anselm, professor of cardiac anesthesiology, arrives in Paris from New York to be part of a surgery team in the winter of 1990, as manifestations against the First Gulf War are raging in the streets. Even as her concerns mount over the shadowy protocols surrounding the planned heart transplant, and even as she falls in love with the Arab diplomat in charge of those protocols, a surprise inheritance—a mysterious Paris apartment and a trove of love letters from the Spanish Civil War, bequeathed to her by a stranger—sweep her through a hidden Paris and into the labyrinth of her own buried past. As the diplomat and the apartment reluctantly reveal their secrets, the tragedies they unearth open a further mystery, the enigma that has haunted Matilde’s life. In the end she is left devastated, liberated, and, for the very first time, herself. Paris Twilight grapples with the meaning of love, the sin of suicide, and the mystery of family in a masterful fiction debut, a dizzying tale of personal transformation.