New Releases by Mark Slouka

A searing, poignantly rendered collection of stories chronicling the lives of ordinary people battling the forces of love and loss, from "one of the great unsung writers of our time" (Colum McCann). In fifteen beautifully wrought stories—ranging from occupied Czechoslovakia to California''s Central Valley to the rainforests of the Pacific Northwest—Mark Slouka explores moments in life when our back is to the wall. One of the most forceful American writers of his generation, Slouka captures the depth and emotional range of an array of characters—from a young boy attempting to shield his father from painful memories in "The Hare''s Mask" to a lonely man whose beloved dog inexplicably begins to sprout razor blades from her skin in "Dog." Whether battling the end of desire, the fact of injustice, or death itself, the men and women in these stories are doing everything possible to tighten their grip on life. In "Crossing," a father hoping to compensate for his failures finds himself facing his past while fording a river with his young son on his back; in "Conception," a young couple frozen by the possible end of their marriage is offered an unexpected way back; in "Half-Life," a proud, aging shut-in finds her resolve tested by an extraordinary visitor determined to shatter her solitude. Like its title, All That Is Left Is All That Matters consoles us with life''s tender humor and unexpected moments of redemption in the face of heartbreak, tragedy, and dislocation.

"I have never before read anything except Nabokov’s Speak, Memory that so relentlessly and shrewdly exhausted the kindness and cruelty of recollection’s shaping devices." —Geoffrey Wolff Born in Czechoslovakia, Mark Slouka’s parents survived the Nazis only to have to escape the Communist purges after the war. Smuggled out of their own country, the newlyweds joined a tide of refugees moving from Innsbruck to Sydney to New York, dragging with them a history of blood and betrayal that their son would be born into. From World War I to the present, Slouka pieces together a remarkable story of refugees and war, displacement and denial—admitting into evidence memories, dreams, stories, the lies we inherit, and the lies we tell—in an attempt to reach his mother, the enigmatic figure at the center of the labyrinth. Her story, the revelation of her life-long burden and the forty-year love affair that might have saved her, shows the way out of the maze.

Born attached at the chest, Chang and Eng were considered a marvel, an omen, an act of God, evidence of His glory or proof of His wrath. Uniquely cursed, enslaved to one another for life, they were a joke of nature variously feared and abhorred, disturbing our most basic assumptions about the human condition. Mark Slouka’s dazzling achievement in God’s Fool is the ease and compassion with which he draws the story of one human being from this ghastly predicament. Looking beyond the twins’ physical connection, he imagines one man’s life of ordinary grace and suffering, longing and resistance, and the ties of love, as well as of blood, that bind and redeem us all. By any standard, theirs is a history of epic variety and drama. Their birth, to an illiterate fishmonger, sent midwives screaming from the room. Condemned to death, they survived to be brought, at the age of thirteen, to the Royal Palace in Bangkok for an audience with King Rama III. At seventeen, laboring as merchants on the Meklong River, they saw their world erased by a typhoon. Consigned for three hundred pounds to an opium trader by their mother, who was desperate to ensure their survival, they sailed for Europe. There they entertained kings and counselors in salons and drawing rooms from Brussels to Rome, and, in Paris, met the woman who would divide them as no surgeon ever could. When the culture that had lifted them up inevitably cast them down, they landed in the flophouses of London, where, penniless and starving, they were discovered by Phineas T. Barnum, who packed them off to America along with an assortment of bearded ladies and two-headed calves, albino beauties and dog boys, German midgets and twelve-fingered flute players. Leaving Barnum at the height of their fame to take a last stab at normal life, they settled in North Carolina, where, despite the tensions growing between them, they found, for a time, tranquillity as farmers and slave owners, marrying a pair of sisters and fathering, between them, twenty children. Their peace, however, would prove to be short-lived. As the Civil War drew closer, and their world began to tilt, they would first turn against each other and then, faced with a trial unlike any they had ever known, draw together once more. No longer young, they set off to find the war, and to save what could be saved. It would be there, on that very real battlefield, that Chang would enact his final, terrifying battle with fate. Sweeping and intimate, vibrant and austere, God’s Fool is a novel of soaring ambition and accomplishment from a fiercely gifted storyteller.

A new collection of prophetic essays from one of the sharpest practitioners of the form Mark Slouka writes from a particular vantage point, one invoked by Thoreau, who wished "to improve the nick of time . . . to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future." At this bewildering convergence, Slouka asks us to consider what it means to be human and what we must revive, or reject, in order to retain our humanity in the modern world. Collected over fifteen years, these essays include fascinating explorations of the relationship between memory and history and the nature of "tragedy" in a media-driven culture; meditations on the transcendent "wisdom" of the natural world and the role of silence in an age of noise; and arguments in defense of the political value of leisure time and the importance of the humanities in an age defined by the language of science and industry. Written in Slouka''s supple and unerring prose, celebratory, critical, and passionate, Essays from the Nick of Time reawakens us to the moment and place in which we find ourselves, caught between the fading presence of the past and the neon lure of the future.

En mand, der er barn af tjekkiske indvandrere i USA, rejser til Prag for at forsøge at forstå sin mors fortid. En søgen, der fører ham til en tragisk kærlighedshistorie og den heroiske tjekkiske modstandskamp.

Growing up in New York as the American-born son of Czech immigrants, the narrator journeys to Prague as an adult in the hope of learning more about his mother, Ivana, her love affair with a member of the Czech Resistance, and their possible involvement in the assassination of a high-ranking Nazi official. By the author of God''s Fool.

Tchécoslovaquie, 1942. Des parachutistes atterrissent secrètement en lisière de la ville. Leur mission : éliminer le " boucher de Prague ", Reinhard Heydrich, architecte de la Solution finale. Ils y parviendront, mais les représailles nazies seront sanglantes : 10 000 Tchèques seront exécutés ou déportés en quelques jours. C''est dans ces circonstances tragiques que la mère du narrateur, Ivana, fait la rencontre de Tomas Bém, l''un des assassins de Heydrich. La mort aux trousses, ces deux êtres vivront une passion amoureuse extraordinaire, dont rien ne pourra jamais chasser les fantômes, ressuscités sous la plume du romancier. De Prague, hier, à New York, aujourd''hui, des limbes du passé aux fragments du présent, le monde de Slouka, que transfigure l''alchimie de l''écriture, est une révélation.

A dozen stories set in New York State, all centered on a lake. In one, a woman rows in the night to meet her lover, in another a man recalls the day his father caught a big fish, or is that a childhood invention? He cannot remember.

Part cultural critique, part call to the ramparts, this funny, eerily disturbing, humanist''s look at the culture of cyberspace suggests that more is going on there than mere on-line communication. Offering a brave new vision of the digital avant-garde, Slouka takes a hard look at this revolution-in-the-making and some of the personalities behind it. Line drawings.