Stone Junction - Softcover

Dodge, Jim

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0802135854 ISBN 13: 9780802135858

Publisher: Grove Press, 1998

Synopsis

Annalee Pearce is a pregnant 16-year-old who has been placed in a corrective centre run by nuns for refusing to co-operate with authorities. Once in there, she soon rebels, breaks a sister's jaw with a "roundhouse right" and, when her son Daniel is born, she steals away into the rain.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

Stone Junction is a wise and wildly imaginative novel about Daniel Pearse, an orphaned child who is taken under the wings of the AMO-Alliance of Magicians and Outlaws. An assortment of sages sharpen Daniel's wide-eyed outlook until he has the concentration of a card shark Zen master, via apprenticeships in meditation, safecracking, poker, and the art of walking through walls. The AMO know wizards are made, not born, and this unconventional education sets Daniel on the trail of a strange, six-pound diamond sphere, held by the U.S. government in a New Mexico vault, rumored to be the Philosopher's Stone or the Holy Grail.

Shadowing the slippery netherworlds of role-playing games like Magic or Dungeons & Dragons, Daniel's quest to retrieve the magic stone and discover who killed his mother becomes a bravura act of storytelling, both a free-spirited adventure and a parable about the powers within us all.

"A post-psychedelic coming-of-age fable that's part Thomas Pynchon, part Tolkien, part Richard Brautigan, a story that owes as much to The Once and Future King as it does to Huckleberry Finn. Stone Junction is a rollicking, frequently surprising adventure-cum-fairy tale. It also has a sweetness about it and an indigenous American optimism, as if somewhere out there, beyond the shopping malls, Oz is waiting."-The New York Times Book Review

"Reading Stone Junction is like being at a nonstop party in celebration of everything that matters."-Thomas Pynchon

Jim Dodge is also the author of Fup and Not Fade Away.

About the Author:

Jim Dodge is a poet and novelist. He lives on an isolated ranch in western Sonoma County and has been by turns an apple picker, a carpet layer, a teacher, a professional gambler, a shepherd and a woodcutter. His other books include Fup, Not Fade Away and a collection of poems and short prose, Rain on the River.

About this edition

• Publisher: Grove Press
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0802135854
• ISBN 13: 9780802135858
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 384