Norman Lock

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

Tooth of the Covenant

A History of the Imagination is a postmodern tale of adventure that reshapes the parameters of time and space, thought and action. In a metaphorical Africa, replete with nostalgia (but no dimensions), anything can happen and usually does. The narrator defends his magical departures, saying his is a history of possibilities, where fiction is "no less real for [it's] being so." But when Darwin's corpse begins to lust after Colette and the African porters go on strike because the author hasn't acknowledged the important role they play, we are left to wonder: just how far is reality from dreams? Norman Lock juxtaposes remote times and places, historical facts and literary fictions, to create an absurdist collage reminiscent of Guy Davenport and Donald Barthelme. In this world it is not impossible to sail from Mombasa to Cinncinati, or to set out from the City of Radiant Objects, where "things are free of the obligation to signify," or to go hunting icebergs in a quest to avenge the Titanic at last. Borne aloft by Wilbur Wright, Jules Verne, Ziegfield, and Houdini, we find ourselves lost again in a "seam in the world...between History and Imagination."

A Novel

History of the Imagination

Grim tales

A scrappy Brooklyn orphan turned vengeful assassin narrates a visionary tale of the American West.

American Meteor

Kim Addonizio

Jack Zipes

Francine Prose

Donna Tartt

Aimee Bender

Kate Bernheimer

Joshua Beckman

Matthew Rohrer

Mary Caponegro

Julie Choffel

Monica Fambrough

Sarah Hannah

Brent Hendricks

Stacey Richter

Marjorie Sandor

Kiki Smith

Sarah Veglahn

Wendy Weitman

Contains poetry, fiction, and essays that either address the abiding influence of fairy tales on contemporary literature and culture, or are themselves contemporary fairy tales in prose or verse.

The Blue Issue

Fairy Tale Review

“[Norman Lock’s fiction] shimmers with glorious language, fluid rhythms, and complex insights.” —NPR In 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. 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.

American Follies

A young surgical assistant faces his doppelganger in a chilling tale featuring Edgar Allan Poe and a lost Poe story"

The Port-Wine Stain

“[Norman Lock’s fiction] shimmers with glorious language, fluid rhythms, and complex insights.” —NPR “[A] dazzling series. . . . Lock’s supple, elegantly plain-spoken prose captures the generosity of the American spirit in addition to its moral failures, and his passionate engagement with our literary heritage evinces pride in its unique character.” —Washington Post Best 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. Norman Lock is the award-winning author of novels, short fiction, and poetry, as well as stage and radio plays. He lives in Aberdeen, New Jersey, where he is at work on the next books of The American Novels series.

Walt Whitman and Louisa May Alcott meet the horrors of the Civil War as they minister to its casualties After 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. Norman Lock is the award-winning author of novels, short fiction, and poetry, as well as stage and radio plays. He lives in Aberdeen, New Jersey, where he is at work on the next books of The American Novels series.

Voices in the Dead House

Walt Whitman and Louisa May Alcott meet the horrors of the Civil War as they minister to its casualties After 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. Norman Lock is the award-winning author of novels, short fiction, and poetry, as well as stage and radio plays. He lives in Aberdeen, New Jersey, where he is at work on the next books of The American Novels series.

“[Norman Lock’s fiction] shimmers with glorious language, fluid rhythms, and complex insights.” —NPR When 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 and radio plays. He lives in Aberdeen, New Jersey, where he is at work on the next books of The American Novels series.

The Wreckage of Eden

“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.

Love Among the Particles

Fiction. LAND OF THE SNOW MEN is a collection of visionary stories and renderings taken from the journals of the enigmatic George Belden, who claimed to be on the tragic expedition led by Robert Falcon Scott to reach the South Pole in 1910 through 1912. Norman Lock discovered Belden and his remarkable journal by accident. He had been for some years in Africa, writing a novel, A History of the Imagination. The strain of living in a country as alien as Africa, with little money and little hope of finding a publisher, caused him to have a nervous breakdown. A friend in Mombassa contacted his wife, who arranged for his return and commitment to a private sanitarium in Vermont's Green Mountains. During the final weeks of Lock's recuperation, the institution's chief of staff asked if he would sort through boxes of old files in the sanitarium's basement to determine whether or not any should be kept. In one of those boxes, Lock found LAND OF THE SNOW MEN.

Land of the Snow Men

“[Norman Lock’s fiction] shimmers with glorious language, fluid rhythms, and complex insights.” —NPR In his third stand-alone 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 Mütter, 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 doppelgänger, he loses his mind and his story to another. The Port-Wine Stain is a gothic psychological thriller whose themes are possession, identity, and storytelling that the master, Edgar Allan Poe, might have been proud to call his own. Norman Lock is the award-winning author of novels, short fiction, and poetry, as well as stage and radio plays. He lives in Aberdeen, New Jersey, where he is at work on the next books of The American Novels series.

"Huck 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 in 1835, they 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 the Native American nations, and the electrification of a continent. While Jim enters real time when he disembarks the raft in the Jim Crow South, Huck finally comes of age when he's washed up on shore during Hurricane Katrina. An old man in 2077, Huck takes stock of his life and narrates his own story, revealing our nation's past, present, and future as Mark Twain could never have dreamed it"--

An American Novel

The Boy in His Winter

"In the seventh standalone title in the American Novels series, Ellen Finch recalls her time as an assistant to Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, heroes of America's woman suffrage movement, and her friendship with the diminutive Margaret, one of P.T. Barnum's "eccentrics" in his circus. When Ellen's infant son is abducted by the Klan to punish her for serving the cause of women, Ellen, Margaret, and the two formidable, if elderly, suffragists must travel aboard Barnum's train from New York to Memphis to rescue the child from death at the fiery cross. American Follies is a savage yet farcical adventure story exploring the roots of America's women's rights movement as well as the depths of our nation's violent and shameful history of prejudice"--

“[Norman Lock’s fiction] shimmers with glorious language, fluid rhythms, and complex insights.” —NPR In 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-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, 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 award-winning author of novels, short fiction, and poetry, as well as stage and radio plays. He lives in Aberdeen, New Jersey, where he is at work on the next books of The American Novels series.

Norman Lock

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