Bradford Morrow

From the critically acclaimed author Bradford Morrow, a literary quest novel that travels from Nazi-occupied Prague to turn-of-the-millennium New York as a young musicologist seeks to solve the mystery behind an eighteenth-century sonata manuscript Music and war, war and music--these are the twin motifs around which Bradford Morrow, recipient of the Academy Award in Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, has composed his magnum opus,The Prague Sonata, a novel more than a dozen years in the making. In the early days of the new millennium, pages of a worn and weathered original sonata manuscript--the gift of a Czech immigrant living out her final days in Queens--come into the hands of Meta Taverner, a young musicologist whose concert piano career was cut short by an injury. To Meta's eye, it appears to be an authentic eighteenth-century work; to her discerning ear, the music rendered there is commanding, hauntingly beautiful, clearly the undiscovered composition of a master. But there is no indication of who the composer might be. The gift comes with the request that Meta attempt to find the manuscript's true owner--a Prague friend the old woman has not heard from since the Second World War forced them apart--and to make the three-part sonata whole again. Leaving New York behind for the land of DvoÅ(tm)Ã¡k and Kafka, Meta sets out on an unforgettable search to locate the remaining movements of the sonata and uncover a story that has influenced the course of many lives, even as it becomes clear that she isn't the only one after the music's secrets. Magisterially evoking decades of Prague's tragic and triumphant history, from the First World War through the soaring days of the Velvet Revolution, and moving from postwar London to the heartland of immigrant America,The Prague Sonata is both epic and intimate, evoking the ways in which individual notes of love and sacrifice become part of the celebratory symphony of life.

A Novel

The Prague Sonata

When reclusive rare-book collector Adam Diehl is found dead in his home, Adam's sister Meghan and her lover Will, a convicted literary forger, begin receiving threatening letters from someone who knows secrets about Adam's death and Will's past.

The Forgers

When a scream shatters the summer night outside their country house in the Hudson Valley, reformed literary forger Will and his wife Meghan find their daughter Maisie shaken and bloodied, holding a parcel her attacker demanded she present to her father. Inside is a literary rarity the likes of which few have ever handled, and a letter laying out impossible demands regarding its future. After twenty years of living life on the straight and narrow, Will finds himself drawn back to forgery, ensnared in a plot to counterfeit the rarest book in American literature: Edgar Allan Poe's first, Tamerlane, of which only a dozen copies are known to have survived. Until now. Facing threats to his life and family, coerced by his former nemesis and fellow forger Henry Slader, Will must rely on the artistic skills of his older daughter Nicole to help create a flawless forgery of this stolen Tamerlane, the Holy Grail of American letters. Part mystery, part case study of the shadowy side of the book trade, and part homage to the writer who invented the detective tale, The Forger's Daughter portrays the world of literary forgery as diabolically clever, genuinely dangerous, and inescapable, it would seem, to those who have ever embraced it.

The Forger's Daughter

New writings—on rooms, buildings, and the spaces and structures that surround us—from Robert Coover, Joyce Carol Oates, Joanna Scott, and more. From huts to houses to high-rises, childhood bedrooms to churches, the spaces we occupy and pass through shape our memories and perceptions, often without our conscious awareness. These stories, essays, and poems from a wide variety of contributors draw on our sense of place to explore the literal and metaphorical meanings of the roofs over our heads, the walls that protect—and separate—us from others, and the caves and castles that humans have made their homes throughout history. Like the best architecture, they combine form and function in a beautiful balance. Conjunctions:68, Inside Out includes original work by Joanna Scott, Andrew Mossin, Claude Simon, Cole Swensen, Robert Clark, Kathryn Davis, Elizabeth Robinson, Gabriel Blackwell, Monica Datta, Robert Kelly, Mary South, Brandon Hobson, Lance Olsen, Susan Daitch, Ryan Call, Nathaniel Mackey, Ann Lauterbach, Can Xue, Matt Reeck, Lisa Horiuchi, Elaine Equi, Robert Coover, G. C. Waldrep, Joyce Carol Oates, Lawrence Lenhart, Mark Irwin, Justin Noga, Karen Hays, John Madera, Karen Hueler, and Frederic Tuten.

Architectures of Experience

Inside Out

Os falsários

A Festschrift in Honor of James Laughlin, Publisher of New Directions

"The Diviner's Tale" is at once a journey of self-discovery and an unorthodox murder mystery, a tale of the fantastic and a family chronicle told by an otherwise ordinary woman.

The Diviner's Tale

Trinity Fields

Bi-Annual Volumes of New Writing (Conjunctions)

Conjunctions

Conjunctions 8 (Conjunctions)

A new novella by acclaimed author Bradford Morrow about a man who tracks an inexplicable plague of bird deaths, and the mystery’s profound effect on his family Hundreds of red-winged blackbirds are discovered scattered, lifeless, around a greenhouse in Warwick, New York. Heaps of common grackles litter the fields of a farm upstate near Stone Ridge. And in Manhattan, a Washington Square restaurant is forced to close its doors when a flock of pigeons inexplicably dies on the sidewalks out front. From Pennsylvania to Maine, birds are falling from the sky en masse—and nobody can figure out why. An insurance claims adjuster and avid birder is one of the first to recognize that something is wrong. His stepdaughter, Caitlin, has also noticed—their common interest in birds is one of the few things they share these days, since her mother died of cancer just six months ago. As they travel the Northeast together to investigate the ominous deaths, a bond forms that might prove strong enough to mend their broken family. Fall of the Birds is a moving story of a haunting near-future and a tribute to the power of love that can survive even the most harrowing of circumstances.

Fall of the Birds

Peter Straub

Literary spins on the science fiction, fantasy, and horror genres—from Karen Joy Fowler, Neil Gaiman, Jonathan Lethem, China Miéville, and many more. Over the past three decades, the most adventurous practitioners of the literary arts of science fiction, fantasy, and horror have been transforming those genres into something all but unrecognizable. In Conjunctions’ game-changing New Wave Fabulists issue, guest editor Peter Straub has put together an anthology of innovative literary reinventions of traditional “pulp” forms. Contributors range from Jonathan Lethem to Neil Gaiman, from John Crowley to Kelly Link, from Elizabeth Hand to China Miéville. Gary K. Wolfe and John Clute contribute essays on the ongoing evolution of genre, while the brilliant cartoonist Gahan Wilson has created the cover and original frontispieces for each story.

The New Wave Fabulists

Ariel Rankin seeks to locate and save her unknown father—a man deeply scarred by his secret and brutal role in the history of his country In the sequel to Bradford Morrow’s heralded Trinity Fields,young New Yorker Ariel Rankin learns that her birth father is not the man who raised her but rather a soldier named Kip Calder who disappeared into the jungles of Laos during the Vietnam War. Hoping to preserve her otherwise happy life, she pushes the revelation out of her mind. But when Ariel finds herself confronting motherhood, she decides to pursue the parent she never knew—a dying man burdened by some of his country’s most terrible secrets, who has returned home to New Mexico in search of redemption. Her quest will take her from the holy village of Chimayo to the highly restricted, pitiless deserts of the White Sands Proving Grounds as she goes straight to the heart of the American experience. Evoking the rugged beauty of the New Mexican landscape, Ariel’s Crossing weaves social with magic realism while creating a moving portrait of that elusive thing we call home.

Ariel's Crossing

The Almanac Branch

Lee Smith

Martine Bellen

In the magnanimous tradition of Henry James's Hawthorn, Charles Olson's Call Me Ishmael and Susan Howe's My Emily Dickinson, our fall issue will present innovative homages by a diverse group of important contemporary American writers in honor of our great forebears and predecessors. In these iconoclastic (break the icons) and post-canonical (quash the canon) times, what better way to review the directions in which literature may now be headed, than to rethink where it has been?

Tributes

Seamus Cooney

A Bibliography of the Black Sparrow Press, 1966-1978

Benjamin Hale

61, A Menagerie

Patrick McGrath

Exploring a landscape of internalized horror, stories by John Edgar Wideman, Angela Carter, Ruth Rendell, Peter Straub, Anne Rice, Martin Amis, and others present a world of madness, terror, death, evil, and perversion.

A Collection of Contemporary Gothic Fiction

The New Gothic

" Duel de faussaires est remarquable. Bradford Morrow est remarquable. Un oiseau rare, sur cette planète ". Michael Cunningham Cela commence brutalement : " On ne retrouva jamais ses mains. " Adam Diehl, collectionneur de livres rares, a été agressé et mutilé dans sa maison de bord de plage à Long Island. Il mourra des suites de ses blessures sans avoir repris connaissance. On est en droit de se demander : pourquoi les mains ? Le narrateur, son ami et beau-frère, est conscient du symbole : faussaire de grand talent, il s'est fait pincer il y a quelques mois. Les mains, c'est tout pour qui veut imiter à la perfection l'écriture de William Faulkner. Ou reconstituer à partir de quelques faits avérés une correspondance de Conan Doyle inexistante... Lorsque entre en scène un autre collectionneur, auteur de lettres de menaces signées " Henry James ", c'est la panique dans le foyer douillet de notre narrateur. Le maître chanteur serait-il le meurtrier ? Que veut-il au juste ? Comment le confondre sans devoir avouer certaines choses ? Un duel démoniaque et subtil s'engage entre les deux hommes sur leur terrain favori : le milieu très fermé de la bibliophilie. Bradford Morrow, 65 ans, a fait ses études à l'Université du Colorado à Boulder. Auteur de six romans, sélectionné pour le PEN/Faulkner Award et lauréat du O'Henry Prize, il enseigne la littérature à Bard College et a fondé la revue Conjunctions. Il vit à New York. Traduit de l'anglais (États-Unis) par Philippe Loubat-Delranc

Bradford Morrow

Books

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