Available April 2011!
Pieces for Small Orchestra & Other Fictions
Cover art by Sasha Meret
ISBN 978-1-933132-85-3
$16.00 US | 158 pages | Spuyten Duyvil 2011
[A] book of many books, all doling out the life (and dream-life) of Alessandro Comi, and showcasing everything that makes Lock’s work great: the vocabulary is demanding, the pages filled with meta-fiction, and the text ripe with ambiguous meaning.
-J.A. Taylor in Ploughshares
A suite of four interacting works that do meta-fictionality without that embarrassing pedantic odor. And in the title work lock so refines a style that his figurines gesture on an exquisite stage with a perfect modulation of wit and heartbreak. These miniatures gradually develop their emotional and formal ambitions so, as with the funambulist named within, we hold our breath — unbelieving the instant-by-instant and sentence-by-sentence marvels of Lock’s high-wire act.
-Eugene Lim
There are moments that remind me of Sax Rohmer or early 20th century science fiction, bits and pieces of language that seem to come out of Jules Verne or Gaston LeRoux. The language itself is quite stylized, replete with a carefully eccentric vocabulary that Lock does very well. He has an impressive ability to create a unique and original world.
-Brian Evenson
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Review on Goodreads.com
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NORMAN LOCK is the author of The King of Sweden (Ravenna Press), Shadowplay (Ellipsis Press), A History of the Imagination (FC2), ‘The Book of Supplemental Diagrams’ for Marco Knauff’s Universe (Ravenna Press), The Long Rowing Unto Morning (Ravenna Press), Two Plays for Radio (Triple Press), and–writing as George Belden–Land of the Snow Men (from Calamari Press and in Japanese from Kawade Shobo Shinsha).
Two short-prose collections – Joseph Cornell’s Operas and Émigrés – were published by Elimae Books and subsequently issued, in Turkish, by an Istanbul publisher as part of its New World Writing series. Together with Grim Tales, they were brought out by Triple Press as Trio. A revised edition of Grim Tales was issued in 2011 by Mud Luscious Press with a foreword by Matt Bell. Cirque du Calder, a hand-made artist’s book with afterword by Gordon Lish, was presented by The Rogue Literary Society.
Stage plays include Water Music, Favorite Sports of the Martyrs, Mounting Panic, The Sinking Houses, The Contract, and The House of Correction (Broadway Play Publishing) – voted one of the best plays of 1988 and 1994 by The Los Angeles Times and critically acclaimed as the best new play of the 1996 Edinburgh Theatre Festival. Women in Hiding, The Shining Man, The Primate House, and Money, Power & Greed were broadcast by WDR, Germany. A screen play, The Body Shop, was produced by the American Film Institute and screened in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Montreal, and New York.
Lock received the Aga Kahn Prize for fiction, given by The Paris Review, fellowships in prose from the New Jersey and the Pennsylvania Councils on the Arts and, in 2011, a fellowship in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts
Lock is represented by Tuttle-Mori Agency in Japan and Per Lauke Verlag in Germany. He can be contacted by email at normanglock [at] gmail [dot] com and by regular mail at 33 Aberdeen Road, Apt. 355A, Aberdeen, NJ 07747.
