Daybook from Sheep Meadow

Peter Dimock

ISBN 10: 1646050592 / ISBN 13: 9781646050598

Published by Deep Vellum Publishing, US, 2021

About this Item

Daybook from Sheep Meadow finds Peter Dimock returning to the breakdown of America's imperialist history that he started exploring in his groundbreaking previous novel, George Anderson: Notes for a Love Song in Imperial Time. In Daybook, Dimock expands on what it means to refute the narrative of American greatness - and what happens once one starts on that path.Historian Tallis Martinson has grappled for years with the atrocities of the American condition through meditative notebook entries, wherein he has attempted to create a "historical method" that guide's an individual 's personal thought outside the language of empire. However, when words fail him completely, he commits himself to a psychiatric facility, mute and unable to write.Daybook presents Tallis' notebook entries, annotated by his brother and editor Christopher Rentho Martinson. Christopher initially follows the entries' complex guided meditations in hopes of being able to reach Tallis during his visits to the psychiatric facility. Instead, he finds himself immersed in his own family's implication in the normalized atrocities of his country's past and present. An experiment in the capacity of literature to re-lay the trajectory of America's future, Daybook stages a space wherein the reader can register - and, potentially, remedy - the criminal catastrophe of the American political arena.

Seller Inventory # LU-9781646050598

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Daybook from Sheep Meadow
• Publisher: Deep Vellum Publishing, US
• Publication Date: 2021
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1646050592
• ISBN 13: 9781646050598
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

Daybook from Sheep Meadow finds Peter Dimock returning to the breakdown of America’s imperialist history that he started exploring in his groundbreaking previous novel, George Anderson: Notes for a Love Song in Imperial Time. In Daybook, Dimock expands on what it means to refute the narrative of American greatness – and what happens once one starts on that path.

Historian Tallis Martinson has grappled for years with the atrocities of the American condition through meditative notebook entries, wherein he has attempted to create a “historical method” that guide’s an individual ‘s personal thought outside the language of empire. However, when words fail him completely, he commits himself to a psychiatric facility, mute and unable to write.

Daybook presents Tallis’ notebook entries, annotated by his brother and editor Christopher Rentho Martinson. Christopher initially follows the entries’ complex guided meditations in hopes of being able to reach Tallis during his visits to the psychiatric facility. Instead, he finds himself immersed in his own family’s implication in the normalized atrocities of his country’s past and present.

An experiment in the capacity of literature to re-lay the trajectory of America’s future, Daybook stages a space wherein the reader can register – and, potentially, remedy – the criminal catastrophe of the American political arena.

About the Author

Peter Dimock has long worked in publishing, both at Random House and as senior executive editor for history and political science at Columbia University Press, where he worked with authors including Angela Davis, Eric Hobsbawm, Toni Morrison, and Amartya Sen. His novels A Short Rhetoric for Leaving the Family and George Anderson: Notes for A Love Song in Imperial Time were published by Dalkey Archive Press.