About this item
"[Norman Lock's fiction] shimmers with glorious language, fluid rhythms, and complex insights." -- NPR"Lock writes some of the most deceptively beautiful sentences in contemporary fiction. Beneath their clarity are layers of cultural and literary references, profound questions about loyalty, race, the possibility of social progress, and the nature of truth . . . to create something entirely new -- an American fable of ideas." -- Shelf Awareness"The Wreckage of Eden is a huge and dark fresco of an army chaplain's journey through very difficult and troubling periods of American history (normally denied us in school) , and all the while this fine angle of approach is like a slow cinematic zoom and track onto an elusive Emily Dickinson ensconced in her Amherst." -- The Brothers Quay, award-winning film directorsWhen U.S. Army chaplain Robert Winter first meets Emily Dickinson, he is fascinated by the brilliance of the strange girl immersed in her botany lessons. She will become his confidante, obsession, and muse over the years as he writes to her of his friendship with the aspiring politician Abraham Lincoln, his encounter with the young newspaperman Samuel Clemens, and his crisis of conscience concerning the radical abolitionist John Brown. Bearing the standard of God and country through the Mexican War and the Mormon Rebellion, Robert seeks to lessen his loneliness while his faith is eroded by the violence he observes and ultimately commits. Emily, however, remains as elusive as her verse on his rare visits to Amherst and denies him solace, a rejection that will culminate in a startling epiphany at the very heart of his despair.Powerfully evocative of Emily Dickinson's life, times, and artistry, this fifth, stand-alone volume in The American Novels series captures a nation riven by conflicts that continue to this day.Norman Lock is the author of, most recently, four previous books in The American Novels series: The Boy in His Winter, American Meteor, The Port-Wine Stain, and A Fugitive in Walden Woods.
About the Author
"[Norman Lock's fiction] shimmers with glorious language, fluid rhythms, and complex insights." (NPR) Lock's AMERICAN NOVELS SERIES"Lock has embarked on a fascinating intellectual and artistic endeavor: engaging American writers from the 19th century through a series of speculative historical novels. . . ." (Library Journal) AUTHOR'S NOTEThe best of our nineteenth-century literature was not small, nor did it consider ethical, political, or social ideas outside the jurisdiction of fiction. My ambition is to confer on readers a larger view of the American present by writing essential stories of a nation being violently made and remade and to undertake the rescue from oblivion certain experiences missing from the national memory. *Lock won The Paris Review Aga Khan Prize for Fiction and has been awarded writing fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts. *FEAST DAY OF THE CANNIBALS (July 2019) "Transfixing. . . . This historically authentic novel raises potent questions about sexuality during an unsettling era in American history past and is another impressive entry in Lock's dissection of America's past." (Publishers Weekly) THE WRECKAGE OF EDEN (June 2019) "Lock deftly tells a visceral story of belief and conflict, with abundant moments of tragedy and transcendence along the way." (Kirkus Reviews) A FUGITIVE IN WALDEN WOODS (June 2017) "Unflinching, penetrative, and bravely earnest. . . . With melodic prose that marvelously captures [the narrator's] searing insights and rich observations, Lock's imaginative novel is a stunning meditation on idealism and the cost of humanity." (Publishers Weekly, starred and boxed review, Pick of the Week) THE PORT-WINE STAIN (June 2016) "Lock's novel engages not merely with [Edgar Poe] but with decadent fin de siècle art and modernist literature that raised philosophical and moral questions about the metaphysical relations among art, science and human consciousness. The reader is just as spellbound by Lock's story as [his novel's narrator] is by Poe's . . . in this mesmerizingly twisted, richly layered homage to a pioneer of American Gothic fiction." (New York Times Book Review) AMERICAN METEOR (June 2015) "Like all Mr. Lock's books, this is an ambitious work, where ideas crowd together on the page like desperate men on a battlefield." (Wall Street Journal) THE BOY IN HIS WINTER (May 2014) ". . . one of the most interesting writers out there. This time, he re-imagines Huck Finn's journeys, transporting the iconic character deep into America's past--and future." (Reader's Digest) LEARN MORE ABOUT LOCK'S AMERICAN NOVELS at Bellevue Literary Press: https://blpress.org/authors/norman-lock/
