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...

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 dark and marvelous journey from the Industrial Age through Hollywood’s Golden Age, into the Digital Age and beyondMr. 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 stor...

In this panoramic tale of manifest destiny, 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 befriends Walt Whitman, becomes a bugler on President Lincoln’s funeral train, apprentices with frontier photographer William Henry Jackson, and stalks General George Custer. When he comes fac...

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...

Huck Finn’s mythic adventures—and childhood—abruptly end when he steps off his raft into Hurricane KatrinaHuck Finn and Jim float on their raft across a continuum of shifting seasons, feasting on a limitless supply of fish and stolen provisions, propelled by the currents of the mighty Mississippi from one adventure to the next. Launched into existence by Mark Twain, they have now been transported by Norman Lock through three vital, violent, and transformat...

NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW “WHAT TO READ NEXT”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 acciden...

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...

Grim Tales is a mythological catalog of the peculiar, a string of strange, often murderous urban myths. It comes on fast and dirty, micro-moments on micro-moments, each wasting no time in lunging at the throat.” -Blake ButlerPRAISEThis is book as turbulence disrupting the smooth sea, as anti-matter breaking bonds that had never before been broken. Throughout, the book defies the physics and metaphysics of our known world even as it pretends to a reaching backward...

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...

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