Depths and Dragons - Softcover

Fox, Hugh

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1908011076 ISBN 13: 9781908011077

Publisher: Skylight Press, 2010

Synopsis

Visionary poet and archeologist Hugh Fox excavates the fragile human psyche and its need for spiritual belonging in his novel Depths and Dragons. The reader will be swept along on a cosmopolitan excursion that skirts variant cultural scapes and languages as it lurches toward some unknown existential destination. The story is told evocatively through a clever synthesis of the tragi-comic and the author's kaleidoscopic stream of consciousness style. Fox is a consummate master of inner monologues that teeter somewhere between the conscious and subconscious without ever fully yielding to either. The aptly named Miriam must undergo a journey of violent displacement between the worlds of Jew and gentile, rabbi and priest, orthodoxy and heresy. Along the way she is made to pay the ultimate price of familial sacrifice, degenerative diaspora, and the loss of her spiritual moorings. The novel battles states of inner and outer terrorism, from physical death to an exalted denial of the flesh, but all the while retaining precious wit and jocularity. The twists and turns of this self-pilgrimage lead to a surprising outcome, and one that will be well worth sharing.

About this title

About the Author

Hugh Fox is a co-founder of the Pushcart Prize for Literature (alongside Anais Nin and others), a champion of small-press publishing and creator of the avant-garde literary magazine Ghost Dance. He is also a well-travelled authority on Latin American archaeology. He has a PhD in American Literature from the University of Illinois, was a professor at Michigan State University for more than three decades, and is the author of some 80 published books, ranging through literary fiction to experimental poetry, archaeology, memoirs, reviews and literary criticism.

Review

'The latest from Hugh Fox, DEPTHS and DRAGONS, is a novel of obsessions: religion and sex. The quest for spiritual significance amidst the demands to satisfy lust; "why are we here?" interspersed with the drive to orgasm. Fans will smile at familiar Fox themes in this romp from Tel Aviv to Paris to Provence, through a Jewish woman's conversion to Catholicism, flirtation with Albigensians, and spiritual re-emergence. Those new to Fox will be amazed by the depth and breadth of the poet-storywriter-reviewer-essayist's knowledge of religion, Israel, and France and his ability to inhabit a complex female artist who travels from wife to mother to widow to burying her children in her search for meaning and belonging.' - Angela Consolo Mankiewicz

Edition details

• Publisher: Skylight Press
• Publication date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1908011076
• ISBN 13: 9781908011077
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 146