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Published Jul 2023
240 pages
Genre: Historical Fiction
Paperback Original.
Publication Information
Ralph Waldo Emerson battles dementia while debating whether to intercede in a Black soldier's unjust arrest.
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.
"An elegiac, powerful book about a thinker's limitations." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"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)
"A fascinating and haunting novel, The Ice Harp chronicles the vulnerable mortality of an American genius." —Foreword Reviews
"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
This information about The Ice Harp was first featured
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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo: Charles Giraudet
Norman Lock is the award-winning author of novels, short fiction, and poetry, as well as stage and radio plays. He has won The Dactyl Foundation Literary Fiction Award, The Paris Review Aga Khan Prize for Fiction, and has been longlisted twice for the Simpson/Joyce Carol Oates Prize. He has also received writing fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in Aberdeen, New Jersey.
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