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Ralph Waldo Emerson battles dementia while debating whether to
intercede in a Black soldier’s unjust arrest In 1879, toward the
end of his life, the Sage of Concord has lost his words. Beset by
aphasia and grief, Ralph Waldo Emerson is scarcely recognizable as
America’s foremost essayist and orator. To the dismay of his
wife, he frequently entertains the specters of his fellow
transcendentalists, including Whitman, Thoreau, John Muir, and
Margaret Fuller, and frets about the future of humankind and the
natural world. Does the present displace the past? Do ideas always
precede actions? What responsibility does each of us bear for the
downtrodden, the preservation of liberty, and the Earth itself?
These metaphysical concerns become concrete when Emerson meets a
Black soldier accused of killing a white man who abused him. The
soldier’s presence demands a response from Emerson, an action
outside the parlors of philosophy and beyond the realm where
language and logic hold sway. The Ice Harp, the tenth stand-alone
book in The American Novels series, is a poignant portrayal of a
literary luminary coming to terms with the loss of memory, the cost
of inaction, and the end of life.
A young woman joins Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and
Barnum's circus to rescue her infant from the KKK In the seventh
stand-alone book of The American Novels series, Ellen Finch, former
stenographer to Henry James, recalls her time as an assistant to
Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, heroes of America's
woman suffrage movement, and her friendship with the diminutive
Margaret, one of P. T. Barnum's circus "eccentrics." When her
infant son is kidnapped by the Klan, Ellen, Margaret, and the two
formidable suffragists travel aboard Barnum's train from New York
to Memphis to rescue the baby from certain death at the fiery
cross. A savage yet farcical tale, American Follies explores the
roots of the women's rights movement, its relationship to the fight
for racial justice, and its reverberations in the politics of
today.
"A Fugitive in Walden Woods manages that special magic of making
Thoreau's time in Walden Woods seem fresh and surprising and
necessary right now. Norman Lock tells the story of Samuel Long, an
escaped slave who encounters Thoreau, with insight and some welcome
humor. This is a patient and perceptive novel, a pleasure to read
even as it grapples with issues that affect the United States to
this day."—Victor LaValle, author of The Ballad of Black Tom and
The Changeling "Portraying the traumatic psychological aftershock
not of war but of slavery provides a convincing and complex
narrative of new hardships faced by escaped slave Samuel Long in
Norman Lock's bold and enlightening novel A Fugitive in Walden
Woods. It's an important novel that creates a vivid social context
for the masterpieces of such writers as Thoreau, Emerson, and
Hawthorne and also offers valuable insights about our current
conscious and unconscious racism."—Sena Jeter Naslund, author of
Ahab's Wife and The Fountain of St. James Court; or, Portrait of
the Artist as an Old Woman Samuel Long escapes slavery in Virginia,
traveling the Underground Railroad to Walden Woods where he
encounters Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel
Hawthorne, William Lloyd Garrison, and other transcendentalists and
abolitionists. While Long will experience his coming-of-age at
Walden Pond, his hosts will receive a lesson in human dignity,
culminating in a climactic act of civil disobedience. Against this
historical backdrop, Norman Lock's powerful narrative examines
issues that continue to divide the United States: racism,
privilege, and what it means to be free in America. Norman Lock is
the author of, most recently, the short story collection Love Among
the Particles, and three previous books in The American Novels
series: The Boy in His Winter, a re-envisioning of Mark Twain's
classic The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, American Meteor, an
homage to Walt Whitman and William Henry Jackson, and The Port-Wine
Stain, an homage to Edgar Allan Poe and Thomas Dent Mütter. He
lives in Aberdeen, New Jersey, where he is at work on the next
books of The American Novels series.
Walt Whitman and Louisa May Alcott meet the horrors of the Civil
War as they minister to its casualties After the Union Army's
defeat at Fredericksburg in 1862, Walt Whitman and Louisa May
Alcott converge on Washington to nurse the sick, wounded, and
dying. Whitman was a man of many contradictions: egocentric yet
compassionate, impatient with religiosity yet moved by the
spiritual in all humankind, bigoted yet soon to become known as the
great poet of democracy. Alcott was an intense, intellectual,
independent woman, an abolitionist and suffragist, who was
compelled by financial circumstance to publish saccharine magazine
stories yet would go on to write the enduring and beloved Little
Women. As Lock captures the musicality of their unique voices and
their encounters with luminaries ranging from Lincoln to
battlefield photographer Mathew Brady to reformer Dorothea Dix, he
deftly renders the war's impact on their personal and artistic
development. Inspired by Whitman's poem "The Wound-Dresser" and
Alcott's Hospital Sketches, the ninth stand-alone book in The
American Novels series is a masterful dual portrait of two iconic
authors who took different paths toward chronicling a country beset
by prejudice and at war with itself.
"Mesmerizingly twisted, richly layered." --New York Times Book
Review "[Norman Lock's fiction] shimmers with glorious language,
fluid rhythms, and complex insights." --NPR In his third book of
The American Novels series, Norman Lock recounts the story of a
young Philadelphian, Edward Fenzil, who, in the winter of 1844,
falls under the sway of two luminaries of the nineteenth-century
grotesque imagination: Thomas Dent Mutter, a surgeon and collector
of medical "curiosities," and Edgar Allan Poe. As Fenzil struggles
against the powerful wills that would usurp his identity, including
that of his own malevolent doppelganger, he loses his mind and his
story to another. Norman Lock is the award-winning author of
novels, short fiction, and poetry, as well as stage, radio, and
screenplays. His recent works of fiction include the short story
collection Love Among the Particles, a Shelf Awareness Best Book of
the Year, and three books in The American Novels series: The Boy in
His Winter, a reenvisioning of Mark Twain's classic The Adventures
of Huckleberry Finn that Scott Simon of NPR's Weekend Edition
hailed for "make[ing] Huck and Jim so real you expect to get
messages from them on your iPhone"; American Meteor, an homage to
Walt Whitman and William Henry Jackson named a Firecracker Award
finalist and Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year; and The
Port-Wine Stain, an homage to Edgar Allan Poe and Thomas Dent
Mutter. Lock lives in Aberdeen, New Jersey.
"Topical, astonishing and provocative . . . a masterful
collection." --"Shelf Awareness for Readers" (starred review)
" Lock's stories] are gems, rich in imagination and language . . .
For all their convolutions of space and time, these stories are
remarkably easy to follow and savor." --"Kirkus Reviews" (starred
review)
"Mr. Hyde finally reveals his secrets to an ambitious journalist,
unleashing unforeseen horrors. An ancient Egyptian mummy is revived
in 1935 New York to consult on his Hollywood biopic. A Brooklynite
suddenly dematerializes and passes through the internet, in search
of true love..."
"Love Among the Particles" is virtuosic storytelling, at once a
poignant critique of our romance with technology and a love letter
to language. In a whirlwind tour of space, time, and history,
Norman Lock creates worlds that veer wildly from the natural to the
supernatural via the pre-modern, mechanical, and digital ages.
Whether reintroducing characters from the pages of Robert Louis
Stevenson, Mark Twain, Franz Kafka, and Gaston Leroux, or
performing dizzying displays of literary pyrotechnics, these
stories are nothing less than a compendium of the marvelous.
Norman Lock is the award-winning author of novels, short fiction,
and poetry, as well as stage, radio, and screenplays. He has won
The Dactyl Foundation Literary Fiction Award, "The Paris Review"
Aga Khan Prize for Fiction, and writing fellowships from the New
Jersey Council on the Arts, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts,
and the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in Aberdeen, New
Jersey.
Nathaniel Hawthorne pens a new tale to exact revenge on his
ancestor, a notorious judge of the Salem witch trials Best known
for his novel The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne was burdened
by familial shame, which began with his great-great-grandfather
John Hathorne, the infamously unrepentant Salem witch trial judge.
In this, the eighth stand-alone book in The American Novels series,
we witness Hawthorne writing a tale entitled Tooth of the Covenant,
in which he sends his fictional surrogate, Isaac Page, back to the
year 1692 to save Bridget Bishop, the first person executed for
witchcraft, and rescue the other victims from execution. But when
Page puts on Hathorne’s spectacles, his worldview is transformed
and he loses his resolve. As he battles his conscience, he finds
that it is his own life hanging in the balance. An ingenious and
profound investigation into the very notion of universal truth and
morality, Tooth of the Covenant probes storytelling’s depths to
raise history’s dead and assuage the persistent ghost of guilt.
"Make[s] Huck and Jim so real you expect to get messages from them
on your iPhone." --SCOTT SIMON, NPR Weekend Edition
"Brilliant...The Boy in His Winter is a glorious meditation on
justice, truth, loyalty, story, and the alchemical effects of love,
a reminder of our capacity to be changed by the continuously
evolving world 'when it strikes fire against the mind's flint,' and
by profoundly moving novels like this." --JANE CIABATTARI, NPR
Launched into existence by Mark Twain, Huck Finn and Jim have now
been transported by Norman Lock through three vital, violent, and
transformative centuries of American history. As time unfurls on
the river's banks, they witness decisive battles of the Civil War,
the betrayal of Reconstruction's promises to the freed slaves, the
crushing of Native American nations, and the electrification of a
continent. Huck, who finally comes of age when he's washed up on
shore during Hurricane Katrina, narrates the story as an older and
wiser man in 2077, revealing our nation's past, present, and future
as Mark Twain could never have dreamed it. The Boy in His Winter is
a tour-de-force work of imagination, beauty, and courage that
re-envisions a great American literary classic for our time. Norman
Lock is the award-winning author of novels, short fiction, and
poetry, as well as stage, radio, and screenplays. His recent works
of fiction include the short story collection Love Among the
Particles, a Shelf Awareness Best Book of the Year, and three books
in The American Novels series: The Boy in His Winter, a
re-envisioning of Mark Twain's classic The Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn; American Meteor, an homage to Walt Whitman and
William Henry Jackson named a Firecracker Award finalist and
Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year; and The Port-Wine Stain, a
gothic psychological thriller featuring Edgar Allan Poe. Lock lives
in Aberdeen, New Jersey.
A bankrupt merchant encounters Herman Melville and is pursued
through the depths of Gilded Age Manhattan by a brutal antagonist
In the sixth stand-alone book in The American Novels series, Shelby
Ross, a merchant ruined by the depression of 1873-79, is hired as a
New York City Custom House appraiser under inspector Herman
Melville, the embittered, forgotten author of Moby-Dick. On the
docks, Ross befriends a genial young man and makes an enemy of a
despicable one, who attempts to destroy them by insinuating that
Ross and the young man share an unnatural affection. Ross narrates
his story to his childhood friend Washington Roebling, chief
engineer of the soon-to-be-completed Brooklyn Bridge. As he is
harried toward a fate reminiscent of Ahab's, he encounters Ulysses
S. Grant, dying in a brownstone on the Upper East Side; Samuel
Clemens, who will publish Grant's Memoirs; and Thomas Edison, at
the dawn of the electrification of the city. Feast Day of the
Cannibals charts the harrowing journey of a tormented heart during
America's transformative age.
Fiction. "There are moments that remind me of Sax Rohmer or early
20th century science fiction, bits and pieces of language that seem
to come out of Jules Verne or Gaston LeRoux. The language itself is
quite stylized, replete with a carefully eccentric vocabulary that
Lock does very well. He has an impressive ability to create a
unique and original world"--Brian Evenson.
In Java, a master of the shadow-puppet theater seeks to possess-by
his art-a woman, who perishes as though by the contagion of his
unnatural desire. Shadowplay is a meditation on story-telling as an
act of seizure, a parable of obsession and of the danger of
confounding the real with its representations. *** "Stories
compensate for lives unlived. They are what Norman Lock, or his
avatar Guntur, calls shadows, negative reflections on a backlit
screen, comprising, through artistry and brief illumination,
ghosts. Lock's teller is imprisoned by darkness, captivated by
warriors and princesses no longer, if ever, living. Death becomes a
distance from which the voices of these unliving return. It is a
journey as delicious as it is threatening." -R.M. Berry *** "Wise
up and get all you can of Lock. His writing was written by a writer
exquisite in the singularity (read for this "genius") of his
utterance." -Gordon Lish *** "[Lock's] prose is melodial, and alert
to every signal from the unseen." -Gary Lutz
Launched into existence by Mark Twain in 1835, Huck Finn and Jim
have now been transported by Norman Lock through three vital,
violent, and transformative centuries of American history. As time
unfurls on the river s banks, they witness decisive battles of the
Civil War, the betrayal of Reconstruction s promises to the freed
slaves, the crushing of the Native American nations, and the
electrification of a continent. Huck, who finally comes of age when
he s washed up on shore during Hurricane Katrina, narrates the
story as an older and wiser man in 2077, revealing our nation s
past, present, and future as Mark Twain could never have dreamed
it.
"The Boy in His Winter" is a tour de force work of imagination,
beauty, and courage that reenvisions a great American literary
classic for our time."
Launched into existence by Mark Twain in 1835, Huck Finn and Jim
have now been transported by Norman Lock through three vital,
violent, and transformative centuries of American history. As time
unfurls on the river s banks, they witness decisive battles of the
Civil War, the betrayal of Reconstruction s promises to the freed
slaves, the crushing of the Native American nations, and the
electrification of a continent. Huck, who finally comes of age when
he s washed up on shore during Hurricane Katrina, narrates the
story as an older and wiser man in 2077, revealing our nation s
past, present, and future as Mark Twain could never have dreamed
it.
"The Boy in His Winter" is a tour de force work of imagination,
beauty, and courage that reenvisions a great American literary
classic for our time."
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