New from Norman Lock: Shadowplay
In ancient Java a master of the shadow-puppet theater seeks to bring back a woman from the dead. A meditation on the powers and limitations of art, Shadowplay is a parable on the art of story-telling and of the danger of confounding the real with its representations.
“Stories compensate for lives unlived. They are what Norman Lock, or his avatar Guntur, calls shadows, negative reflections on a backlit screen, comprising, through artistry and brief illumination, ghosts. Lock’s teller is imprisoned by darkness, captivated by warriors and princesses no longer, if ever, living. Death becomes a distance from which the voices of these unliving return. It is a journey as delicious as it is threatening.”
–R.M. Berry, author of Frank and Leonardo’s Horse
In the Dickinsonian tradition, Lock is adept at writing about places he has never been. He develops exotic lexicons of objects to stage his dramas. Pure objects, the words for them as portrayed in other books & art, unencumbered by the reality of the objects themselves…. this is the brilliance of Lock—he mines the unknown or underknown for gems whose value is not relevant to the soil they were dug up from, for no other reason other than in the name of art.
––Derek White, Publisher of Calamari Press and author of Marsupial and Poste Restante
“Lock’s language reflects the fabulous nature of the myth, intricate in description but never hard to understand, full of repeated images that, however simple, resonate deeply within the story.”
“Just as a dalang retells ancient and iconic stories in his puppet-theatre, Shadowplay is itself a fable that stages the storyteller’s struggle between imagination and reality, experience and its record… Mistaking the shadow for the object from which it is cast, [Lock] illustrates the fact that the narratives we use to make sense of the world sometimes do so at the expense of our experience of it.”
–Monica McFawn in Rain Taxi Review of Books
“This is a cerebral work, and Lock is a heady writer, yet he evokes a deeply sensual world in which the smell of cinnamon all but sings in the breeze and the sea beckons like a lover… The novel stands on its own and does its tricky work unaided, like the afterlife of a dream.”
–Dawn Raffel in The Brooklyn Rail
Order from the publisher, from Small Press Distribution, Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, or your local independent bookstore.
Read an excerpt at The Collagist.
Read an interview with Lock by Matt Bell on the writing of Shadowplay.
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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).
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. 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, in 1979. He has worked as a writer in an advertising agency and has taught creative writing and literature in a federal prison. He holds a BA from the University of Pennsylvania and an MFA from Syracuse University. He lives in Philadelphia with his wife Helen.
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 Norman Lock; c/o Meredith Comi; 3 Miriam Place; Matawan, NJ 07747.
