The Boy in His Winter

Praise for The Boy in His Winter Reader's Digest Great Books from Small Presses That Are Worth Your Time Library Journal Discoveries Selection [Lock] is one of the most interesting writers out there. This time, he re-imagines Huck Finn's journeys, transporting the iconic character deep into America's past--and future. --Reader's Digest Lock plays profound tricks, with language--his is crystalline and underline-worthy--and with time, the perfect metaphor for which is the mighty Mississippi itself. --Publishers Weekly (starred and boxed review) Nothing less than the story of America itself ... The Boy in His Winter is extraordinary. Lock writes some of the most deceptively beautiful sentences in contemporary fiction. Beneath their clarity are layers of cultural and literary references, profound questions about loyalty, race, the possibility of social progress, and the nature of truth and story. They merge with an iconic American character, tall tales intact, to create something entirely new--an American fable of ideas. --Shelf Awareness An eclectic hybrid of literary appropriation, Zelig-like historical narrative, time-travel tale and old-style picaresque. --Kirkus Reviews In this surreal and otherworldly river journey through time, Norman Lock transports Huck Finn down the Mississippi and deep into America's history--and future. Elegant and imaginative, The Boy in His Winter is a tale that's as hypnotic as it is profound. --GILBERT KING, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America I read Norman Lock's The Boy in His Winter with delight and amazement. Styled in the vernacular of a rapidly changing America, it stays true to the themes of Mark Twain's original: class relations, race and slavery, childhood innocence, moral hypocrisy--and, of course, the stark beauty and unforgiving nature of America's greatest river. I finished this absolutely elegant narrative feeling that Huck Finn has never been more alive. --DAVID M. OSHINSKY, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Polio: An American Story and Worse Than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice Praise for Norman Lock One could spend forever worming through [Lock's] magicked words, their worlds. --Believer No other writer in recent memory, lives up to [Whitman's] declaration that behind every book there is a hand reaching out to us, a hand to be held onto, a hand that has the power to touch us, to make us feel. --Detroit Metro Times Lock is a rapturous storyteller, and his tales are never less than engrossing. --Kenyon Review Lock's writing is beautiful, with clean, clear, perfect sentences ... seducing the reader with language and narrative into a fully realized alternative world. --Shelf Awareness for Readers Lock's stories stir time as though it were a soup ... beyond the entertainment lie 21st-century conundrums: What really exists? Are we each, ultimately, alone and lonely? Where is technology taking humankind? --Kirkus Reviews Our finest modern fabulist. --Bookslut A master storyteller. --Largehearted Boy [A] contemporary master of the form [and] virtuosic fabulist. --Flavorwire I can't think of another author who takes such evident, vocal delight in bending the laws of physics and geography (to say nothing of his flouting of various narratological and fictional norms). You can feel the joy leaping off the page. --Full Stop [Lock] is not engaged in either homage or pastiche but in an intense dialogue with a number of past writers about the process of writing, and the nature of fiction itself ... taking a trope that seems familiar to readers of the weird but analysing it in the fiercest detail. --Weird Fiction [Lock's] window onto fiction [is] a welcome one: at once referential and playful, occupying a similar post-Borges space to the short stories of Stephen Millhauser and Neil Gaiman. --Vol. 1 Brooklyn All hail Lock, whose narrative soul sings fairy tales, whose language is glass. --KATE BERNHEIMER, editor of xo Orpheus: Fifty New Myths, My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me and Fairy Tale Review [Lock] has an impressive ability to create a unique and original world. --BRIAN EVENSON, author of Windeye and Immobility