New from Bellevue Literary Press: Voices in the Dead House

The Ice Harp

The tenth stand-alone book of The American Novels series.
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ISBN: 9781954276178  |  Ebook ISBN: 9781954276185 | Bellevue Literary Press | July 4, 2023

In 1879, toward the end of his life, the Sage of Concord has lost his words. Beset by aphasia and grief, Ralph Waldo Emerson is scarcely recognizable as America’s foremost essayist and orator. To the dismay of his wife, he frequently entertains the specters of his fellow transcendentalists, including Whitman, Thoreau, John Muir, and Margaret Fuller, and frets about the future of humankind and the natural world. Does the present displace the past? Do ideas always precede actions? What responsibility does each of us bear for the downtrodden, the preservation of liberty, and the Earth itself? These metaphysical concerns become concrete when Emerson meets a Black soldier accused of killing a white man who abused him. The soldier’s presence demands a response from Emerson, an action outside the parlors of philosophy and beyond the realm where language and logic hold sway.

The Ice Harp, the tenth stand-alone book in The American Novels series, is a poignant portrayal of a literary luminary coming to terms with the loss of memory, the cost of inaction, and the end of life.

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 PRAISE FOR The Ice Harp and The American Novels series

“Norman Lock has created a memorable portrait gallery of American subjects, in a succession of audaciously imagined, wonderfully original, and beautifully written novels unlike anything in our literature.”
Joyce Carol Oates

“In The Ice Harp, Norman Lock deftly takes us into the polyphonic swirl of Emerson’s mind at the end of his life, inviting us to meet the man anew even as the philosopher fights to stop forgetting himself. Who will I be when the words are gone, the great thinker wonders, and how will I know what is right? I gladly asked myself these same impossible questions on every page of this remarkably empathetic and deeply moral novel.”
—Matt Bell, author of Appleseed and Refuse to Be Done

“Here is Emerson unleashed—caustic, brilliant, befuddled, wrangling with the living and the dead. Delights of language and character shine on every page of The Ice Harp as Emerson confronts his own humanity.”
Victoria Redel, author of Before Everything and Paradise 

“What troubled Emerson still troubles us today, as Norman Lock makes clear. . . . A harrowing novel.”
New York Sun

“Lock’s latest in his luminous American Novels series . . . provides countless memorable turns of phrase, and it is the rare paragraph that does not inspire underlining as Lock explores memory, mortality, and the passage of time”
Booklist, Starred Review

“An elegiac, powerful book about a thinker’s limitations.”
Kirkus, Starred Review

“A fascinating and haunting novel, The Ice Harp chronicles the vulnerable mortality of an American genius.”
Foreword Reviews

“As intellectually entertaining as it is memorably thought provoking.”
Midwest Book Review

“Reveal[s] a man still deeply troubled by serious questions and regrets about his life’s work, particularly his lack of meaningful action in the matters of slavery and civil rights. . . . Emerson probably would have loved the novel.”
Historical Novels Review

“[Lock’s] American Novels series makes a huge contribution to our understanding of the ideas and lives of some of America’s most outstanding thinkers.”
—Linda Bond, Auntie’s Bookstore (Spokane, WA)

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NORMAN LOCK
 has written novels, short fiction, and poetry as well as stage plays, dramas for German radio, a film for The American Film Institute, and scenarios for video-art installations. His plays have been produced in the U.S., Germany, at the Edinburgh Theatre Festival, and in Turkey. His work has been translated into Dutch, German, Spanish, Turkish, Polish, Greek, and Japanese.

He received the Aga Kahn Prize, given by The Paris Review, the Literary Fiction Prize, given by The Dactyl Foundation of the Arts & Humanities, fellowships from the New Jersey Council on the Arts, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Lock can be contacted by email at normanglock [at] gmail [dot] com.