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 Emb...

Quietly, simply, elegantly, Norman Lock channels, through his “Plain Jane” narrator, our gorgeous desolation, our longing for connection, both earthly and divine. The Long Rowing Unto Morning spirits the reader into richly emotional and primal realms; it’s a book to return to again and again.–– Dawn Raffel, Author of Carrying the BodyNorman Lock’s The Long Rowing Unto Morning captures the life of a wounded and hampered individual whom we normally ...

Shakespeare reimagined in a novel of King Lear, resurrected from the heath to bear witness at time’s end, and six stories that present the Bard’s bit characters anewNorman Lock recasts King Lear as a survivor of Shakespeare’s tragic play, condemned to live as an old man forever on the heath, where the bucolic landscape evolves into a post-industrial ruin. Reduced from the pinnacle of power to the depths of homelessness and servitude, Lear observes history’...

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 a...

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...

A scrappy Brooklyn orphan turned vengeful assassin narrates a visionary tale of the American WestIn this panoramic tale of Manifest Destiny—the second stand-alone book in The American Novels series—Stephen Moran comes of age with the young country that he crosses on the Union Pacific, just as the railroad unites the continent. Propelled westward from his Brooklyn neighborhood and the killing fields of the Civil War to the Battle of Little Big Horn, he befr...

Henry David Thoreau’s principles are tested when a young man escapes from slavery into Walden WoodsIn Norman Lock’s fourth stand-alone book of The American Novels series, 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-a...

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, a...

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 democ...

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

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...

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...