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Mohrbooks Literary Agency
Sebastian Ritscher |
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| English | |
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| paullafarge.com | |
THE NIGHT OCEAN
THE NIGHT OCEAN is the captivating new novel from award-winning author and New Yorker contributor Paul La Farge about secrets and scandals, psychiatry and pulp fiction, inspired by the lives of H.P. Lovecraft and his circle.
Marina Willett, M.D., has a problem. Her husband, Charlie, has become obsessed with H.P. Lovecraft, in particular with one episode in the legendary horror writer’s life: In the summer of 1934, the “old gent” lived for two months with a young, gay fan named Robert Barlow, at Barlow’s family home in central Florida. What were the two of them up to? Were they friends – or something more? Just when Charlie thinks he’s solved the puzzle, a new scandal erupts, and he disappears. The police say it’s suicide. Marina is a psychiatrist, and she doesn’t believe them.
A tour-de-force of storytelling, The Night Ocean follows the lives of some extraordinary people: Lovecraft, the most influential American horror writer of the 20th century, whose stories continue to win new acolytes, even as his racist views provoke new critics; Barlow, a brilliant scholar of Mesoamerican culture who killed himself after being blackmailed for his homosexuality (and who collaborated with Lovecraft on the beautiful story “The Night Ocean”); the Futurians, a group of spirited, politically minded science fiction writers active in the ‘30s and ‘40s, whose members include Isaac Asimov, James Blish, and Judith Merril; and L.C. Spinks, a kindly Canadian appliance salesman and WWII vet, who is the only person who knows the origin of The Erotonomicon, purported to be the intimate diary of Lovecraft himself.
As a determined, heartbroken Marina follows her missing husband’s trail in an attempt to learn the truth, the novel moves across the decades and along the length of the continent, from a remote Ontario town, through New York and Florida and Lovecraft’s hometown of Providence, to Mexico City. The Night Ocean is about love and deception: it’s about the way that stories earn our trust, and betray it.
Paul La Farge is the author of the novels The Artist of the Missing (FSG 1999), Haussmann, of the Distinction (FSG 2001), and Luminous Airplanes (FSG/Fourth Estate 2011), as well as The Facts of Winter (McSweeney’s Books 2005), a book of imaginary dreams. His stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Believer, McSweeney’s, Nautilus, Conjunctions and elsewhere. He has won the Bard Fiction Prize, two California Book Awards, and the Bay Area Book Critics’ Award for fiction. In 2013-14 he was a fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the New York Foundation for the Arts.
A tour-de-force of storytelling, The Night Ocean follows the lives of some extraordinary people: Lovecraft, the most influential American horror writer of the 20th century, whose stories continue to win new acolytes, even as his racist views provoke new critics; Barlow, a brilliant scholar of Mesoamerican culture who killed himself after being blackmailed for his homosexuality (and who collaborated with Lovecraft on the beautiful story “The Night Ocean”); the Futurians, a group of spirited, politically minded science fiction writers active in the ‘30s and ‘40s, whose members include Isaac Asimov, James Blish, and Judith Merril; and L.C. Spinks, a kindly Canadian appliance salesman and WWII vet, who is the only person who knows the origin of The Erotonomicon, purported to be the intimate diary of Lovecraft himself.
As a determined, heartbroken Marina follows her missing husband’s trail in an attempt to learn the truth, the novel moves across the decades and along the length of the continent, from a remote Ontario town, through New York and Florida and Lovecraft’s hometown of Providence, to Mexico City. The Night Ocean is about love and deception: it’s about the way that stories earn our trust, and betray it.
Paul La Farge is the author of the novels The Artist of the Missing (FSG 1999), Haussmann, of the Distinction (FSG 2001), and Luminous Airplanes (FSG/Fourth Estate 2011), as well as The Facts of Winter (McSweeney’s Books 2005), a book of imaginary dreams. His stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Believer, McSweeney’s, Nautilus, Conjunctions and elsewhere. He has won the Bard Fiction Prize, two California Book Awards, and the Bay Area Book Critics’ Award for fiction. In 2013-14 he was a fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the New York Foundation for the Arts.
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Book
Published 2017-03-07 by The Penguin Press |
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Book
Published 2017-03-07 by The Penguin Press |