THE AMERICAN PLAN, HABITUS BOOKS, 2018                                    

Praise for The American Plan:

David Weisberg explores the pulpy underside of the Florida dream in the go-go years of the 1950s and early ‘60s. Philip Narby is like a dark twin to JFK: young, handsome, effortlessly charismatic, fascinated with sexual conquest, allergic to Cold War conformity, and obscurely damaged by his experience of war. His lover Willa Branton, an abstract painter dedicated to the higher calling of art, shares his quest for freedom of all kinds. They have the world on a string. But it all goes wrong. Love fades, art fails, the schemers and conspirators rise, and the racists win. Suburbia conquers all. A gripping thriller narrative and a rich social history of the years that made the modern USA

. - Sean McCann, Wesleyan University, author of Gumshoe America: Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction and the Rise and Fall of the New Deal and A Pinnacle of Feeling: American Literature and Presidential Government.

“A grand, sweeping, postwar novel and a hard-boiled thriller...The American Plan never loses the pounding sense of uncertainty and risk that makes it a page-turner.” 

 - Foreword Clarion Reviews

“David Weisberg’s The American Plan is an exceptional pleasure, a sweeping novel about a soldier wounded in the Korean War who lands in pre-revolutionary Cuba, crosses the Florida Straits, and settles amid scrub palmetto and Australian pines in the languor and humidity of southwest Florida. Philip Narby, clutching his fifth of Jim Beam and torn by internal demons, is an unlikely bit player in the runaway development that marked mid-century Florida…. his story is the American Dream itself, shorn of its myths, rocked by racism, fueled by insatiable desires and reconfigured by powerful forces of nature.”

- Tim Johnson, McClatchy News, Winner of the Pulitzer for Journalism 2018, author of Tragedy in Crimson: How the Dalai Lama Conquered the World but Lost the Battle with China.

“It’s Faulkner meets Hiaasen in this debut novel of lust, intrigue, greed, and environmental destruction set against the backdrop of Jim Crow race relations in Cold War Florida ... The novel’s great achievement is to contemplate the political sleaze and petty dreams behind Florida’s development while telling a compelling story that kept me turning pages late into the night.”

- Gail Hollander, Florida International University, author of Raising Cane in the ’Glades: The Global Sugar Trade and the Transformation of Florida.

“The American Plan has history in its DNA.”

- Benjamin Hale, author of The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore and The Fat Artist and Other Stories.

CHRONICLES OF DISORDER: SAMUEL BECKETT AND THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF THE MODERN NOVEL. SUNY PRESS, 2001.

“David Weisberg’s Chronicles of Disorder is an excellent instance of the new contextualizing trend of Beckett criticism… Beckett’s writing, in Weisberg’s view, maps the riven site of modern intellectual labor itself …. In its larger ambitions, his book helps sharpen the broad rethinking of the fate of modernism from the late 1920s to the 1950s. For this, and its many nuanced readings of Beckett’s text, his book deserves high praise.”

- Tyrus Miller, Professor of Art History and English, U.C. Irvine. Author of Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction, and the Arts Between the World Wars; Singular Examples: Artistic Politics and the Neo-Avant Grade and other works on the cultural history of modernism.