ISBN 978-1935084-41-9
\n 300 pages: $17.95
\n October, 2014<\/p>\n
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This thematic, novel-length collection of stories, is set on Nantucket Island, Massachusetts.\u00a0 Nantucket as we know it began as an English settlement relatively early in the colonial period of the United States.\u00a0 In the heyday of its nineteenth century success as a whaling center, the island, for being as small as it is, was quite the cosmopolitan center.\u00a0 Sailors from across the globe mingled with the mixed local population of descendents of the original English settlers, black Americans, and native Americans.\u00a0 Today too Nantucket is known as being especially open to visitors from around the world. When one travels there, one feels that one is no longer in the United States but in a culturally indistinct, in-between land, somehow equidistant from North America, the Caribbean, and Northern Europe.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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“This island feels like some mad doctor\u2019s lab experiment\u201d\u2014so says one of the fictional residents of\u00a0Nantucket Island, the setting of John Vanderslice\u2019s extraordinary story collection\u00a0Island Fog.\u00a0 But Vanderslice is by no means a mad doctor, though he is definitely one insanely talented writer.\u00a0 In the eleven literary experiments that comprise his book,\u00a0he brilliantly parses the soul of America from 1795 to 2005 through the microcosm of Nantucket Island.\u00a0 To borrow the words of yet another of his characters, he conveys \u201cthe awful weight of history pressing down upon the island\u201d and conveys it so viscerally that we feel that \u201ctime has stopped or has circled around on itself\u201d and we are \u201cback inside that living spiraling body, that awful protean force\u201d that was, and is, not just the island but America.\u00a0 This is a book that anyone interested in the grand, failed experiment that is America should read.\u00a0 It will open your eyes, and your heart. <\/p>\n John Vanderslice\u2019s debut collection is a whopping cycle of beautifully crafted stories spanning over two hundred years of Nantucket history, each emerging from the fog of the past crystal clear, complete, and poignant. Reading Vanderslice\u2019s stories, it\u2019s as if Ishmael has never boarded the whaleship\u00a0Pequod<\/em>\u00a0<\/strong>in Nantucket, as if he\u2019s remained island-bound to tell these far-reaching, masterful tales. In a gripping, surreal novella reminiscent of Kafka\u2019s\u00a0The Trial<\/em><\/strong>, Vanderslice opens the collection in 1795, during which a consortium of religious oligarchs use a bank robbery as a kind of witch hunt to consolidate power. In \u201cKing Philip\u2019s War,\u201d the narrator challenges a Native American boy in a footrace whose outcome is more onerous than he can imagine. From the travails of whaling widows, to a ship\u2019s Captain who must resort to cannibalism to survive on the high seas, to an African-American school teacher stalked by her students, we see Nantucket\u2019s earliest European and native inhabitants struggling to find a place in this island community. In part two of the collection, beginning in 1999, Nantucket transforms from a site of colonization and industrial whaling to a tourist town, dead and haunted in its off-seasons, a crossroads for people running from others, and from themselves. A carpenter struggles with a \u201cfog of soporific recollections\u201d at the death of his wife and child.\u00a0 A man flees a love affair in Boston to establish a company giving ghost tours, only to be haunted himself. Jamaican immigrants find veiled resentment. The titular novella bookends this richly realized collection. In it, a young man flunking out of U Mass finds himself on a purgatorial visit to Nantucket, where he is hired to participate as an actor in \u201cHopes and Promises\u201d tableaus that reenact customers\u2019 past moments of deepest desires and regrets. Read this book! Rarely have I enjoyed a story collection with such artistic and historical sweep, one so quintessentially and vibrantly American. <\/p>\n John Vanderslice’s Island Fog is far more than just a collection of stories. Tied together by a place and its history, the collection tells the story of Nantucket Island through the desperate lives and conflicts, hopes and sorrows of its inhabitants. I began reading the collection assuming it was for folks who have known or loved Nantucket and by the third story I was convinced that Island Fog is for anyone who loves good stories, beautifully told, with a good slice of the twisted history of humanity thrown in. <\/p>\n In this quirky yet captivating collection of ten stories and two novellas, all set on Nantucket, the island is both microcosm and prism, through which the reader catches illuminated glimpses of American life, from the hard, dangerous times of the whaling community to the present-day tony resort of the super-wealthy\u2014and yet the same problems beset the inhabitants through the centuries: racism, class exploitation, sexual identity, envy and fidelity. The essence of all the fictions is \u201cthe awful weight of history pressing down upon the island\u201d, and in a twenty-first century America struggling to reconstruct its identity, the reader cannot but hope that the idyllic and mythic island might give us a clue about who we are. And yet in the final novella, \u201cIsland Fog\u201d, a chilling tour-de-force worthy of Chesterton or Borges, we find ourselves in a place so far from reality that, like its hapless and trapped protagonist, we wonder if we are doomed to play parts in someone else\u2019s fantasies forever. John Vanderslice is a writer of vision and this is a haunting, essential collection.<\/p>\n \u2014Garry Craig Powell<\/strong>, author of\u00a0Stoning the Devil<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" John Vanderslice
\n \u2014David Jauss<\/strong>, author of\u00a0Glossolalia<\/strong><\/em>\u00a0<\/strong>and\u00a0Black Maps<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n
\n \u2014Wendell Mayo<\/strong>, author of\u00a0The Cucumber King of Kedainiai: Fictions<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n
\n \u2014Robert Hicks<\/strong>, author of\u00a0The Widow of the South<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0and\u00a0A Separate Country<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n
\n 9781935084419
\n …a chilling tour-de-force worthy of Chesterton or Borges…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":143,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"product_brand":[],"product_cat":[16],"product_tag":[45,79],"class_list":{"0":"post-142","1":"product","2":"type-product","3":"status-publish","4":"has-post-thumbnail","6":"product_cat-lavender-ink","7":"product_tag-fiction","8":"product_tag-john-vanderslice","10":"first","11":"instock","12":"taxable","13":"shipping-taxable","14":"purchasable","15":"product-type-simple","16":"berocket_lgv_grid","17":"berocket_lgv_list_grid"},"yoast_head":"\n