A Rave for Quinnehtukqut [link]

John Cotter, Open Letters Monthly

Quinnehtukqut
Joshua Harmon
Starcherone Books, 2007

{This month's issue of Open Letters features a lead review of Joshua Harmon's Quinnehtukqut by John Cotter, who calls it "the most accomplished debut I’ve read in years...." Read on.... - ed.}

Vermont shares so smooth a northern border with New York, you could finish their maps with a straight edge and a single stroke. But travel one state over, and you’ll find the Canadian border as complex and cragged as the spider web of wide rivers and narrow lakes that shape it. They are the headwaters of the Connecticut River (“Kwenitekq or Quinatucquet—something like that the native tribesmen called their Great River, speaking so low in their throats”). Here, briefly, was once an independent nation, “The Republic of Indian Stream,” and here is the spiritual home of Joshua Harmon’s haunting novel Quinnehtukqut, the most accomplished debut I’ve read in years.

An unassuming package, Quinnehtukqut’s dull beige cover reproduces a period photograph of a couple of backwoods swells smirking outside a clapboard post office. It looks eerily like a snap from one of those Arcadia collections: Images of [Your Town] drawn from historic post cards and documents. As soon as you open the book and read a few lines, you’ll find Quinnehtukqut to be the opposite of that black and white embalming fluid with which we set our local histories. Here is a whole shelf of books: adventure stories, tearjerker romances, historical curios, post-modern poetry, fairytales. Reading Quinnehtukqut is like dropping a dozen of these books on the sofa next to you (what a friend of mine used to call “full-contact reading”), and skipping from book to book, until it gradually dawns on you that that the same current runs through all of them. The story is the same; only the weather changes.

Harmon is a brave writer, and one of the novel’s great strengths is its daring mix of narrative styles: from a straight third-person which easily shuttles back and forth through time, to haunting impressionistic monologues, to jagged, folkloric nuggets and parallel narratives that creep alongside one another on the page. What’s remarkable about this mixture of methods is how accessible it is. Harmon takes care to provide lots of concrete detail, the “whipchords, puttees, suspenders, crumpled and battered hats” of the old New Hampshire settlers, and the feel of the woods, the “dirt, dirt worn smooth, the twigs ironlike, the spruce bark and frozen pitch.” [continued...]

{for more, click the link above.}

{to purchase Quinnehtukut, click here.}

The Odyssey, or, What's in the Horse?

Zachary Mason's book The Lost Books of the Odyssey just came back from the printer and I am beside myself with anticipation to see what people think of this book. It was the winner of our 2nd most recent contest, judged by Carole Maso -- and I remember Carole writing to me about it after the judging was done and saying, "You're really lucky to have found this one." It's a miracle of a book -- for his debut, Zachary Mason has imagined a long-lost ur-text of the Odyssey, with alternate episodes, fragments, retelling and the like of the original, and rendered it in such stunning fashion that Harry Mathews (whom Mason wrote, out of the blue) had this to say:

"“Zachary Mason’s astounding glosses of The Odyssey plunge us into an unforeseeable and hypnotic dimension of fiction. Of the three possible interpretations of the work that he proposes — Homeric stories anciently reproduced by recombining their components, a Theosophist dream of abstract mathematics, and pure illusion (that is, it was all made up by him) — the result is one and the same. This enthralling book is his doing, whether as translator, conjuror, or author. I vote for number three.”

OK, OK, I won't make this a simple press release. I have more to tell. Dig this picture of sculptures that Mason commissioned to enclose review copies sent to five major reviewers -- Harper's, NY Times Book Review, NY Review of Books, New Yorker, and LA Times Book Review. Each review copy, wrapped in white crepe paper written over with gold calligraphy, goes inside a sculpture.

I take no credit for this -- this was Zach's idea -- and one of the smarter and more stylish book campaigns I've seen. Now hopefully it will work, and people will pay attention to this absolutely singular book -- a book I can honestly say (though such a statement is subjective, and there's a disagreement in the very next post) is the most impressive first novel I have ever seen.

Since the originals of these are off to do their business and will be seen by relatively few people, I wanted to show them here. You gotta go a long way these days to try to get a review these days for a small press book! But this book especially is one I hope people really pay attention to.

Go to Mason's Starcherone page to order the book here.