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Fritz Agency
Christian Dittus
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English
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http://www.peterrockproject.com

THE NIGHT SWIMMERS

Peter Rock

Beneath the surface of Lake Michigan there are vast systems: crosscutting currents, sudden drop-offs, depths of absolute darkness, shipwrecked bodies, hidden places. Peter Rock's stunning autobiographical novel begins in the '90s on the Door Peninsula of Wisconsin. The narrator, a recent college graduate, and a young widow, Mrs. Abel, swim together at night, making their way across miles of open water, navigating the currents and swells and carried by the rise and fall of the lake. The nature of these night swims, and of his relationship to Mrs. Abel, becomes increasingly mysterious to the narrator as the summer passes, until the night that Mrs. Abel disappears.

Twenty years later, the narrator—now married with two daughters—tries to understand those months, his forgotten obsessions and dreams. Digging into old notebooks and letters, as well as clippings he's preserved on the “psychic photography” of Ted Serios and scribbled quotations from Rilke and Chekhov, the narrator rebuilds a world he's lost. He also looks for clues to the fate of Mrs. Abel, and begins once again to swim distances in dark water.

Peter Rock is the author of nine previous works of fiction, including My Abandonment, which won the Alex Award and was adapted into the film Leave No Trace, directed by Debra Granik (Winter's Bone). He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and is a professor of creative writing at Reed College.
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Published 2019-01-01 by Soho Press

Comments

"Among the many pleasures of this riveting book is its intertextual nature: stitched through the story are old letters to a past lover, new emails from the past lover, the diary of a dead painter, a literary rejection note, and other bright scraps. The Night Swimmers is a beautiful delving, a rapturous dive into the mysteries of ordinary life." —Leni Zumas, author of Red Clocks "Peter Rock has written a weird and haunting story about a younger man and an older woman who like to swim in the dark. Happily The Night Swimmers is no male coming of age story. Instead their secret nightly practice in a dark and foreboding lake shimmers as a queer refusal for either of them to grow up right." —Eileen Myles, author of Afterglow "I sat down to read Peter Rock's new novel, The Night Swimmers, and didn't get up again until I'd finished, heart in throat, tears in eyes, mind spinning with all the things this kaleidoscopic book is about." —Susan Choi, author of My Education "Haunting, elegiac . . . the book's moody sense of hidden depths and dangers will intrigue those open to an atmospheric and contemplative novel." —Publishers Weekly "Part page-turner and part aesthetic treatise, Rock's (Spells, 2017, etc.) latest is, like the currents of the Great Lakes, subtle and haunted, deeply complex and 'quietly . . . sinister'; his readers, like his swimmers, ought to know 'that the currents of the subsurface are likely to be moving.'" —Kirkus Reviews "An undeniably lovely novel." —Booklist "The turbulent and unpredictable Lake Michigan where the pair swim is an apt metaphor for this heavily atmospheric novel. Those who love enigma will love this." —Library Journal “[A] strangely mesmeric new novel . . . Peter Rock does dazzling things with meta-crypto-autobiography in The Night Swimmers, playfully commingling curation and creation, and wrestling with a writer's compulsion to resolve past mysteries that leak into the present.” —New York Journal of Books