Norman Lock

In Java, a master of the shadow-puppet theater seeks to possess--by his art--a woman, who perishes as though by the contagion of his unnatural desire. Shadowplay is a meditation on story-telling as an act of seizure, a parable of obsession and of the danger of confounding the real with its representations

"In this panoramic tale of Manifest Destiny, Stephen Moran comes of age with the young country that he crosses on the Union Pacific, just as the railroad unites the continent. Propelled westward from his Brooklyn neighborhood and the killing fields of the Civil War to the Battle of Little Big Horn, he befriends Walt Whitman, becomes a bugler on President Lincoln's funeral train, apprentices with frontier photographer William Henry Jackson, and stalks...

"The fourth self-contained volume of The American Novels series tells the story of Samuel Long, who escapes slavery in Virginia by traveling the Underground Railroad to Walden Woods, where he encounters Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Lloyd Garrison, and other transcendentalists and abolitionists. While Long will experience his coming-of-age at Walden Pond, his hosts will receive a lesson on human dignity, culminating...

"In the seventh standalone title in the American Novels series, Ellen Finch recalls her time as an assistant to Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, heroes of America's woman suffrage movement, and her friendship with the diminutive Margaret, one of P.T. Barnum's "eccentrics" in his circus. When Ellen's infant son is abducted by the Klan to punish her for serving the cause of women, Ellen, Margaret, and the two formidable, if elderly, suffragists...