This episode features writer Norman Lock reading from and discussing his recently published Feast Day of the Cannibals.

Among the many things we talk about are writing, literature, reading, books, questions, intertextuality, experimental fiction, history, fiction, historical fiction, research, Henry Melville, Moby Dick, unreliable narrators, sentences, teaching, the Brooklyn Bridge, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, Henry David Thoreau, Walden, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, Tommaso Landolfi, Eugène Ionesco, Italo Calvino, “metaphoric enlargement,” symbolic language, poetry, teaching, Gordon Lish, The Quarterly, twentieth-century art, beauty, attention, technology, The Flip: Epiphanies of Mind and the Future of Knowledge, Baruch Spinoza, David Hume, Joseph Campbell, the so-called other, cultural appropriation, Samuel Beckett, Winslow Homer, authorial insertion, and more.

Norman Lock is the the critically-acclaimed author of novels, short fiction, and poetry, as well as stage, radio, and screenplays. His most recent books include the short story collection Love Among the Particles and six books in the American Novels series, including the recently published Feast Day of the Cannibals, about which Publishers Weekly wrote: “This historically authentic novel raises potent questions about sexuality during an unsettling era in American history  and is another impressive entry in Lock’s dissection of America’s past.” Norman Lock won the Dactyl Foundation Literary Fiction Award, The Paris Review Aga Khan Prize for Fiction, and writing fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in Aberdeen, New Jersey.