The Night Ocean

Zusatztext 47503648 Informationen zum Autor Paul La Farge is the author of the novels The Artist of the Missing (1999)! Haussmann! or the Distinction (2001)! and Luminous Airplanes (2011)! as well as The Facts of Winter (2005)! a book of imaginary dreams. His stories and essays have appeared in T he 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. Klappentext From the award-winning author and New Yorker contributor! a riveting novel 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 gay teenage 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 seminal scholar of Mexican culture who killed himself after being blackmailed for his homosexuality (and who collaborated with Lovecraft on the beautiful story "The Night Ocean"); his student! future Beat writer William S. Burroughs; and L.C. Spinks! a kindly Canadian appliance salesman and science-fiction fan -- the only person who knows the origins of The Erotonomicon ! purported to be the intimate diary of Lovecraft himself. As a 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 to Mexico City. The Night Ocean is about love and deception -- about the way that stories earn our trust! and betray it. 1. My husband, Charlie Willett, disappeared from a psychiatric hospital in the Berkshires on January 7, 2012. I say disappeared because I don’t believe he’s dead, although that would be the reasonable conclusion. Charlie’s army jacket, jeans, shoes, socks, and underwear (though, strangely, not his shirt) were all found at the edge of Agawam Lake the day after he left the hospital. The police say Charlie’s footprints led to the edge of the lake, and nobody’s footprints led away. Even if Charlie could somehow have left the lake without leaving tracks, they say, it’s hard to see how he would have survived long enough to reach shelter. According to the National Weather Service, the overnight low temperature in Stockbridge was 15 degrees, and Charlie didn’t have an extra set of clothes: the girl who gave him a ride swears he wasn’t carrying anything. What’s more, no one denies that Charlie was suicidal. The last time I saw him, in Brooklyn, he told me he’d taken a handful of Ambien, just to see what would happen. What happened was, he slept for twelve hours, had a dizzy spell in the shower, and sprained his ankle. “My life is becoming a sad joke,” he said, “except there’s no one around to laugh at it.” He looked at me entreatingly. I told him ...

Product details

• Authors: Paul La Farge, Paula La Farge
• Publisher: Penguin Books USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 31.03.2017
• EAN: 9781101981085
• ISBN: 978-1-101-98108-5
• Dimensions: 167 mm x 242 mm x 30 mm
• Subject: Fiction > Narrative literature