Norman Lock - Böcker

"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.

"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.

"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.

"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 WomanSamuel 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.

A nineteenth-century army chaplain confesses his loss of faith in God and country to his first love, poet Emily DickinsonWhen 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 book in The American Novels series captures a nation riven by conflicts that continue to this day.

A bankrupt merchant encounters Herman Melville and is pursued through the depths of Gilded Age Manhattan by a brutal antagonistIn 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.

A young woman joins Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Barnum’s circus to rescue her infant from the KKKIn 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.

Nathaniel Hawthorne pens a new tale to exact revenge on his ancestor, a notorious judge of the Salem witch trialsBest 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.

Walt Whitman and Louisa May Alcott meet the horrors of the Civil War as they minister to its casualtiesAfter 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.

Ralph Waldo Emerson battles dementia while debating whether to intercede in a Black soldier’s unjust arrestIn 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 artist meets Stephen Crane as America’s hunger for empire draws them both into warOliver Fischer, a self-styled bohemian, boardwalk caricaturist, and student at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, enrages his banker father and earns the contempt of Philadelphia’s foremost realist painter Thomas Eakins when he attempts to stage Manet’s scandalous painting The Luncheon on the Grass. Soon after, he is ensnarled, along with Mark Twain and Andrew Carnegie, in a clash between the Anti-Imperialist League and their expansionist foes. Sent to Key West to sketch the 1898 American invasion of Cuba, in company with war correspondent Stephen Crane, he realizes––in the flash of a naval bombardment––that our lives are suspended by a thread between radiance and annihilation.The Caricaturist, the penultimate, stand-alone book in The American Novels series, is a tragicomic portrait of America struggling to honor its most-cherished ideals at the dawn of the twentieth century.

A disabled Civil War veteran makes an epic, westward journey toward a fateful encounter with author Jack London, only hours before the 1906 San Francisco earthquakeRendered mute at the Battle of Gettysburg, Frederick Heigold returns to Dobbs Ferry, New York, where he marries a resolute suffragist and resumes his vocation as a clocksmith. Bereft after she dies in a freak accident, he accepts a commission to repair the enormous clock on the San Francisco Embarcadero, but the routine railway journey becomes a six-month odyssey. Finally reaching the Pacific, after having survived imprisonment, shipwreck on Edisto Island, and run-ins with assorted roughnecks and thieves, he happens upon novelist Jack London drinking in the Palace Hotel bar—just before one of the deadliest natural disasters in United States history.Eden’s Clock, the twelfth and final stand-alone book in The American Novels series, calls into question the American belief in individualism to shape our destiny when confronted with irrepressible, chaotic forces.