Overview

"Simpson/Joyce Carol Oates Prize Longlist ""[Norman Lock's fiction] shimmers with glorious language, fluid rhythms, and complex insights."" -NPR 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. Norman Lock is the award-winning author of novels, short fiction, and poetry, as well as stage, radio, and screenplays. He lives in Aberdeen, New Jersey, where he is at work on the next books of The American Novels series."

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9781942658467

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Reviews

Praise for Feast Day of the Cannibals This spectacular work will delight and awe readers with Lock's magisterial wordsmithing. -Library Journal (starred review) 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 Lock's latest entry in his superb American Novels series again features his remarkable eye for historical detail and fine-tuned felicity with the language of the period. At times, the sparkling prose is nearly indistinguishable from that of the authors Lock so clearly admires, Melville, Hawthorne, and Thoreau. . . . The mellifluous language, literary allusions, and some subtle Moby-Dick parallels, such as Melville using a harpoon to kill rats in the hulls of ships, will delight fans of classic American literature. -Booklist Engrossing and elegant, Feast Day of the Cannibals captures America's kaleidoscopic spirit during a tumultuous, rapacious era. -Foreword Reviews While Moby-Dick is often referenced by the characters, it's Billy Budd, a later work of Melville's, that's alluded to thematically, as Lock addresses questions of desire and repression, both personal and societal. . . . [Feast Day of the Cannibals] memorably provides a window into old New York and its narrator's conflicted mind. -Kirkus Reviews Select Praise for the previous books in Norman Lock's The American Novels Series 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 American Novels series, Norman Lock's current multi-year, multi-volume project, is nothing short of his most ambitious endeavor yet . . . a fusion of all his preoccupations: fabulism, storytelling and the story of the telling, and the exploration of history, its discontents and malcontents. -Big Other In each [American Novels series] volume the first-person narrator functions as a kind of refractive lens, bending and blending together a generation of texts and ideas within a single mind, and yielding a spectrum of impressions on the development of American culture and identity. -Millions On The Boy in His Winter 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. -NPR [Lock] is 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 To call [The Boy in His Winter] a work of fiction is to tell only part of the story. This book is as much a treatise on memory and time and the nature of storytelling and our collective national conscience. . . . Much of it wildly funny and extremely intelligent. -Star Tribune Lock plays profound tricks, with language-his is crystalline and underline-worthy-and with time, the perfect metaphor for which is the mighty Mississippi itself. -Publishers Weekly (starred review) On American Meteor Sheds brilliant light along the meteoric path of American westward expansion. . . . [A] pithy, compact beautifully conducted version of the American Dream, from its portrait of the young wounded soldier in the beginning to its powerful rendering of Crazy Horse's prophecy for life on earth at the end. -NPR [Walt Whitman] hovers over [American Meteor], just as Mark Twain's spirit pervaded The Boy in His Winter. . . . 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 [American Meteor] feels like a campfire story, an old-fashioned yarn full of rich historical detail about hard-earned lessons and learning to do right. -Publishers Weekly (starred review) American Meteor is, at its core, a spiritual treatise that forces its readers to examine their own role in history's unceasing march forward [and] casts new and lyrical light on our nation's violent past. -Shelf Awareness for Readers (starred review) On The Port-Wine Stain Lock's novel engages not merely with [Edgar Allan Poe and Thomas Dent Mutter] but with decadent fin de siecle 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. . . . Echoes of Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray and Freud's theory of the uncanny abound in this mesmerizingly twisted, richly layered homage to a pioneer of American Gothic fiction. -New York Times Book Review As polished as its predecessors, The Boy in His Winter and American Meteor. . . . An enthralling and believable picture of the descent into madness, told in chillingly beautiful prose that Poe might envy. -Library Journal (starred review) As lyrical and alluring as Poe's own original work, The Port-Wine Stain captures the magic, mystery, and madness of the great American author while weaving an eerie and original tale in homage to him. -Foreword Reviews This chilling and layered story of obsession succeeds both as a moody period piece and as an effective and memorable homage to the works of Edgar Allan Poe. -Kirkus Reviews On A Fugitive in Walden Woods 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. . . . 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 Bold and enlightening. . . . 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 Bursts with intellectual energy, with moral urgency, and with human feeling. . . . Achieves the alchemy of good fiction through which philosophy takes on all the flaws and ennoblements of real, embodied life. -Millions Demonstrates Lock's uncanny ability to inhabit historical figures and meticulously capture the vernacular of the time like a transcendentalist ventriloquist. . . . Offer[s] profound insights that sharpen our understanding of American history. -Booklist (starred review) On The Wreckage of Eden Perceptive and contemplative. . . . Bring[s] the 1840-60s to life with shimmering prose. -Library Journal (starred review) Lock deftly tells a visceral story of belief and conflict, with abundant moments of tragedy and transcendence along the way. -Kirkus Reviews The lively passages of Emily's letters are so evocative of her poetry that it becomes easy to see why Robert finds her so captivating. The book also expands and deepens themes of moral hypocrisy around racism and slavery. . . . Lyrically written but unafraid of the ugliness of the time, Lock's thought-provoking series continues to impress. -Publishers Weekly [A] consistently excellent series. . . . Lock has an impressive ear for the musicality of language, and his characteristic lush prose brings vitality and poetic authenticity to the dialogue. -Booklist

Praise for Feast Day of the Cannibals Simpson/Joyce Carol Oates Prize Longlist Big Other Book Award Finalist Advocate Best LGBTQ Novels of the Year selection Foreword Reviews Book of the Day selection Feast Day of the Cannibals is the first of [Lock's American Novels] to explore the lives of 19th-century men who felt a sexual attraction to each other. . . . [His] recreation of a past time and place is impressive, but his signal achievement in this novel is the voice of its narrator, Shelby Ross. . . . Lock does not merely imitate 19th-century prose; he makes it his own, with verbal flourishes worthy of Melville. -Gay & Lesbian Review This spectacular work will delight and awe readers with Lock's magisterial wordsmithing. -Library Journal (starred review) 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 Lock's latest entry in his superb American Novels series again features his remarkable eye for historical detail and fine-tuned felicity with the language of the period. . . . [Feast Day of the Cannibals] will delight fans of classic American literature. -Booklist Engrossing and elegant, Feast Day of the Cannibals captures America's kaleidoscopic spirit during a tumultuous, rapacious era. -Foreword Reviews While Moby-Dick is often referenced by the characters, it's Billy Budd, a later work of Melville's, that's alluded to thematically, as Lock addresses questions of desire and repression, both personal and societal. . . . [Feast Day of the Cannibals] memorably provides a window into old New York and its narrator's conflicted mind. -Kirkus Reviews A slow-burning tale of repression and sublimation, a work that tells a tale of obsession and the violence that ensues. -Vol. 1 Brooklyn As in his previous novels, Lock both presents an engrossing storyline and a vivid sense of life in late 19th-century Manhattan. -Our Man in Boston Select Praise for the previous books in Norman Lock's The American Novels Series [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 American Novels series, Norman Lock's current multi-year, multi-volume project, is nothing short of his most ambitious endeavor yet . . . a fusion of all his preoccupations: fabulism, storytelling and the story of the telling, and the exploration of history, its discontents and malcontents. -Big Other In each [American Novels series] volume the first-person narrator functions as a kind of refractive lens, bending and blending together a generation of texts and ideas within a single mind, and yielding a spectrum of impressions on the development of American culture and identity. -Millions The American Novels series [is] a unique blend where historic figures are given new (fictional) lives yet their re-envisioned stories shed light on the formation of the American mind and the fabric of our society. -Advocate On The Boy in His Winter 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. -NPR [Lock] is 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 To call [The Boy in His Winter] a work of fiction is to tell only part of the story. This book is as much a treatise on memory and time and the nature of storytelling and our collective national conscience. . . . Much of it wildly funny and extremely intelligent. -Star Tribune Lock plays profound tricks, with language-his is crystalline and underline-worthy-and with time, the perfect metaphor for which is the mighty Mississippi itself. -Publishers Weekly (starred review) On American Meteor Sheds brilliant light along the meteoric path of American westward expansion. . . . [A] pithy, compact beautifully conducted version of the American Dream, from its portrait of the young wounded soldier in the beginning to its powerful rendering of Crazy Horse's prophecy for life on earth at the end. -NPR [Walt Whitman] hovers over [American Meteor], just as Mark Twain's spirit pervaded The Boy in His Winter. . . . 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 [American Meteor] feels like a campfire story, an old-fashioned yarn full of rich historical detail about hard-earned lessons and learning to do right. -Publishers Weekly (starred review) American Meteor is, at its core, a spiritual treatise that forces its readers to examine their own role in history's unceasing march forward [and] casts new and lyrical light on our nation's violent past. -Shelf Awareness for Readers (starred review) On The Port-Wine Stain Lock's novel engages not merely with [Edgar Allan Poe and Thomas Dent Mutter] but with decadent fin de siecle 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. . . . Echoes of Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray and Freud's theory of the uncanny abound in this mesmerizingly twisted, richly layered homage to a pioneer of American Gothic fiction. -New York Times Book Review As polished as its predecessors, The Boy in His Winter and American Meteor. . . . An enthralling and believable picture of the descent into madness, told in chillingly beautiful prose that Poe might envy. -Library Journal (starred review) As lyrical and alluring as Poe's own original work, The Port-Wine Stain captures the magic, mystery, and madness of the great American author while weaving an eerie and original tale in homage to him. -Foreword Reviews This chilling and layered story of obsession succeeds both as a moody period piece and as an effective and memorable homage to the works of Edgar Allan Poe. -Kirkus Reviews On A Fugitive in Walden Woods 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. . . . 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 Bold and enlightening. . . . 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 Bursts with intellectual energy, with moral urgency, and with human feeling. . . . Achieves the alchemy of good fiction through which philosophy takes on all the flaws and ennoblements of real, embodied life. -Millions Demonstrates Lock's uncanny ability to inhabit historical figures and meticulously capture the vernacular of the time like a transcendentalist ventriloquist. . . . Offer[s] profound insights that sharpen our understanding of American history. -Booklist (starred review) On The Wreckage of Eden Perceptive and contemplative. . . . Bring[s] the 1840-60s to life with shimmering prose. -Library Journal (starred review) Lock deftly tells a visceral story of belief and conflict, with abundant moments of tragedy and transcendence along the way. -Kirkus Reviews The lively passages of Emily's letters are so evocative of her poetry that it becomes easy to see why Robert finds her so captivating. The book also expands and deepens themes of moral hypocrisy around racism and slavery. . . . Lyrically written but unafraid of the ugliness of the time, Lock's thought-provoking series continues to impress. -Publishers Weekly [A] consistently excellent series. . . . Lock has an impressive ear for the musicality of language, and his characteristic lush prose brings vitality and poetic authenticity to the dialogue. -Booklist

Select Praise for Norman Lock's The American Novels Series 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 American Novels series, Norman Lock's current multi-year, multi-volume project, is nothing short of his most ambitious endeavor yet . . . a fusion of all his preoccupations: fabulism, storytelling and the story of the telling, and the exploration of history, its discontents and malcontents. --Big Other In each [American Novels series] volume the first-person narrator functions as a kind of refractive lens, bending and blending together a generation of texts and ideas within a single mind, and yielding a spectrum of impressions on the development of American culture and identity. --Millions On The Boy in His Winter 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. --NPR [Lock] is 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 To call [The Boy in His Winter] a work of fiction is to tell only part of the story. This book is as much a treatise on memory and time and the nature of storytelling and our collective national conscience. . . . Much of it wildly funny and extremely intelligent. --Star Tribune Lock plays profound tricks, with language--his is crystalline and underline-worthy--and with time, the perfect metaphor for which is the mighty Mississippi itself. --Publishers Weekly (starred review) On American Meteor Sheds brilliant light along the meteoric path of American westward expansion. . . . [A] pithy, compact beautifully conducted version of the American Dream, from its portrait of the young wounded soldier in the beginning to its powerful rendering of Crazy Horse's prophecy for life on earth at the end. --NPR [Walt Whitman] hovers over [American Meteor], just as Mark Twain's spirit pervaded The Boy in His Winter. . . . 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 [American Meteor] feels like a campfire story, an old-fashioned yarn full of rich historical detail about hard-earned lessons and learning to do right. --Publishers Weekly (starred review) American Meteor is, at its core, a spiritual treatise that forces its readers to examine their own role in history's unceasing march forward [and] casts new and lyrical light on our nation's violent past. --Shelf Awareness for Readers (starred review) On The Port-Wine Stain Lock's novel engages not merely with [Edgar Allan Poe and Thomas Dent M tter] but with decadent fin de si cle 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. . . . Echoes of Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray and Freud's theory of the uncanny abound in this mesmerizingly twisted, richly layered homage to a pioneer of American Gothic fiction. --New York Times Book Review As polished as its predecessors, The Boy in His Winter and American Meteor. . . . An enthralling and believable picture of the descent into madness, told in chillingly beautiful prose that Poe might envy. --Library Journal (starred review) As lyrical and alluring as Poe's own original work, The Port-Wine Stain captures the magic, mystery, and madness of the great American author while weaving an eerie and original tale in homage to him. --Foreword Reviews This chilling and layered story of obsession succeeds both as a moody period piece and as an effective and memorable homage to the works of Edgar Allan Poe. --Kirkus Reviews On A Fugitive in Walden Woods 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. . . . 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 Bold and enlightening. . . . 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 Bursts with intellectual energy, with moral urgency, and with human feeling. . . . Achieves the alchemy of good fiction through which philosophy takes on all the flaws and ennoblements of real, embodied life. --Millions Demonstrates Lock's uncanny ability to inhabit historical figures and meticulously capture the vernacular of the time like a transcendentalist ventriloquist. . . . Offer[s] profound insights that sharpen our understanding of American history. --Booklist (starred review) On The Wreckage of Eden Perceptive and contemplative. . . . Bring[s] the 1840-60s to life with shimmering prose. --Library Journal (starred review) Lock deftly tells a visceral story of belief and conflict, with abundant moments of tragedy and transcendence along the way. --Kirkus Reviews The lively passages of Emily's letters are so evocative of her poetry that it becomes easy to see why Robert finds her so captivating. The book also expands and deepens themes of moral hypocrisy around racism and slavery. . . . Lyrically written but unafraid of the ugliness of the time, Lock's thought-provoking series continues to impress. --Publishers Weekly [A] consistently excellent series. . . . Lock has an impressive ear for the musicality of language, and his characteristic lush prose brings vitality and poetic authenticity to the dialogue. --Booklist

Author Information

Norman Lock is the award-winning author of novels, short fiction, and poetry, as well as stage and radio plays. He has won The Dactyl Foundation Literary Fiction Award, The Paris Review Aga Khan Prize for Fiction, and has been longlisted twice for the Simpson/Joyce Carol Oates Prize. He has also received writing fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in Aberdeen, New Jersey, where he is at work on the next books of The American Novels series.

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