Bøger i American Novels serien

"e;[Norman Lock's fiction] shimmers with glorious language, fluid rhythms, and complex insights."e; -NPRWhen 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.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.

"Oliver 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"--