Love Among the Particles
-
- $14.99
-
- $14.99
Publisher Description
“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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In his newest collection, surrealist storyteller Lock (Pieces for Small Orchestra & Other Fictions) ob-sesses over the dreamscape of the past, composing stories that are enticingly and enigmatically rele-vant for the present. Lock focuses on where the popular lore and the technological anxieties of the Gilded Age interweave: Edward Hyde's voice recorded on Edison's phonograph, the Mummy invited to California to oversee the technical details of a horror movie, a steward lost on ship laying the trans-atlantic cable. For a reader in the digital age, these moments may seem familiar: a crowd cheering the appearance of the director of railroads parallels our own pop culture adoration for pioneers in mobile technology. Although by the end Lock catches up to the 21st century, the majority of this collection seems an experiment to help him come to terms with the digital age, a motif he confronts in the final three narratives. Regardless of motive, these humorous, imaginative meditations on the nature of dreams, time, and space shimmer in their own darkness. There is some danger in Lock's prose as it nears ponderousness in its extreme patience, but reminiscent of the plays of Samuel Beckett, there is a wealth of insight here.
