THE AMALGAMATION POLKA; Signed 1st

Wright, Stephen

ISBN 10: 067945117X / ISBN 13: 9780679451174

Published by Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2006

About this Item

Very Good+ in a Very Good+ dust jacket. Stated First Edition.; Signed by author.; 9.10 X 6.50 X 1.40 inches; 304 pages; Signed by Author.

Seller Inventory # 81083

Bibliographic Details

• Title: THE AMALGAMATION POLKA; Signed 1st
• Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf, New York
• Publication Date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 067945117X
• ISBN 13: 9780679451174
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: First Edition; First Printing.
• Signed: Signed
• Seller catalogs:
  • Signed Books

About this title

Synopsis

Hailed by the San Francisco Chronicle as “a bright star in the literary sky,” Stephen Wright now extends his astonishing accomplishment with a Civil War novel unlike any other.

Born in 1844 in bucolic upstate New York, Liberty Fish is the son of fervent abolitionists as well as the grandson of Carolina slaveholders even more dedicated to their cause. Thus follows a childhood limned with fugitive slaves moving through hidden passageways in the house, his Uncle Potter’s free-soil adventure stories whose remarkable violence sets the tone of the mounting national crisis, and the inevitable distress that befalls his mother whenever letters arrive from her parents—a conflict that ultimately costs her her life and compels Liberty, in hopes of reconciling the familial disunion, to escape first into the cauldron of war and then into a bedlam more disturbing still.

Rich in characters both heartbreaking and bloodcurdling, comic and horrific, The Amalgamation Polka is shot through with politics and dreams, and it captures great swaths of the American experience, from village to metropolis to plantation, from the Erie Canal to the Bahamas, from Bloody Kansas to the fulfillment of the killing fields. Yet for all the brutality and tragedy, this novel is exuberant in the telling and its wide compassion, brimming with the language, manners, hopes, and fears of its time—all of this so transformed by Stephen Wright’s imaginative compass that places and events previously familiar are rendered new and strange, terrifying and stirring. Instantly revelatory, constantly mesmerizing, this is the work of a major writer at the top of his form.

About the Author

Stephen Wright was educated at the U.S. Army Intelligence School and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He has taught at Princeton University, Brown University, and, most recently, The New School. He lives in New York City.