Joshua Harmon
Quinnehtukqut - $16
Quinnehtukqut
Set in a region of northern New Hampshire that for several years in the 1830s
declared itself an independent nation, Joshua Harmon's debut novel traces
the real and imagined travels of Martha Hennessy, a girl wishing for a life
beyond her family's farm. In language as varied and musical as the Connecticut
River the title invokes, Quinnehtukqut interweaves
Martha's story with those of the dreamers and drifters whose lives intersect
hers: an American soldier scarred by the first World War, a mythical and murderous
tramp seeking lost Indian gold, a man haunted by his memories of Byrd's expeditions
to Antarctica, an industrialist longing to become a woodsman, and an old woman
forced to leave her home due to the planned flooding of a valley. Elegiac
and lyrical, evocative and visionary, Quinnehtukqut
reveals how people inhabit place and how place inhabits people through its
vivid study of the New England landscape.
"Joshua Harmon has written a wonderful first novel, austere and beautiful,
daringly original, and deeply mysterious, like history itself."
David Means
"Quinnehtukqut evokes the impressionistic sweep
and lyrical beauty of The English Patient alongside
the brilliant idiosyncratic vitality of Mason and Dixon.
But Joshua Harmon is a thoroughly original writer, who is doing no less than
reinventing storytelling before our eyes, by means of a dazzling, ever-shifting
formal innovation, the primary allegiance of which is always to music. Quinnehtukqut
is mesmerizing line by line." Mary Caponegro
"Through a series of loosely linked fictions that toy with both the mythologizing
and the dislocating effects of language, Quinnehtukqut
provides a mesmerizing picture of a place over time. Teasing a complex and
compelling narrative out of a vast array of voices, documentation, and styles,
this is historical fiction at its most eccentric and best."
Brian Evenson
"Joshua Harmon's magical postmodern epic ranges across time, threading fragments
of oral history, diaries, and news accounts into parallel tales of mystery,
wonder, and tragedy. Quinnehtukqut calls to mind
the perceptive historical accuracy of W.G. Sebald and the experimental bravura
of Sorrentino or Sukenick, but Joshua Harmon has fashioned a novel completely
his own." Jayne Anne Phillips
"What survives and what is lost - frontiers, houses, towns, loves, parents,
stories - is at the core of Harmon's stunning adventure in narrative, Quinnehtukqut.
Sentence by sentence, fragment by fragment, couplet by couplet he 'pushes
back the darkness' creating 'a gorgeous signal along the horizon.'"
Victoria Redel
Joshua
Harmon was born and raised in Massachusetts. He graduated with highest honors
from Marlboro College, and received an MFA from Cornell University. His
work has been published in Antioch Review, Iowa
Review, New England Review, Southern
Review, TriQuarterly, Verse,
and many other magazines, and he has received fellowships in fiction from
the National Endowment for the Arts and the Rhode Island State Council on
the Arts. He teaches at Vassar College and lives in Poughkeepsie, NY. For
more information, visit joshuaharmon.net
ISBN 0-9788811-2-5 ISBN-13 978-0-9788811-2-2
Print run: 2,000 Price: $16.00
Official release: June 15, 2007
Contact: Ted Pelton, Starcherone Books, PO Box 303, Buffalo, NY 14201. Phone:
716-885-2726. Fax: 716-884-0291. ted@starcherone.com
Distribution through Small Press Distribution, Baker & Taylor, Amazon.com,
Barnes & Noble, etc.
Book tour: New York, Boston, Buffalo, Minneapolis, Philadelphia,, Richmond
VA, Portland OR, Los Angeles, New Haven CT, Athens GA, Brattleboro VT, etc.