9.16.07 Brock Clarke, author of An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England
After spending ten years in prison for accidentally burning down Emily Dickinson’s house—killing two people in the process—Sam Pulsifer is determined to start a new life.
But when the houses of Mark Twain, Robert Frost, Edith Wharton, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Melville, and Nathaniel Hawthorne (and the replica log cabin of Thoreau’s Walden Pond) start going up in smoke, Sam’s past comes back to haunt him.
Who is committing literary arson in Sam’s name, and why? Author Brock Clarke gets to the bottom of this literary mystery—and has readers guessing until the very end—in his brilliant and moving satirical novel, An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England
About the Author: Brock Clarke is the author of The Ordinary White Boy, What We Won’t Do, and Carrying the Torch. He has twice been a finalist for a National Magazine Award in Fiction. His work has appeared in the Virginia Quarterly Review, OneStory, The Believer, the Georgia Review, and The Southern Review; in the Pushcart Prize and New Stories from the South anthologies; and on NPR’s Selected Shorts. He teaches creative writing at the University of Cincinnati.
Essential Links
Bookslut.com Interview
L.A. Times Review
Office Website for the Book
Read an excerpt!
Brock Clarke’s blog
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Ideas for books often come from some little kernel of something that won’t leave you alone, and I’m guess that this story had an interesting kernel. What was it that prompted you to come up with the idea of burning not simply famous people’s houses, but writer’s houses?
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How was writing this novel different from all your other writing thus far? What about it tested you the most?
What triggered the work, the novel-an idea, an image, or another source of inspiration?
[…] to be surrounded by the likes of Brock Clarke (please don’t get me rambling on how much I swooned over his novel), Elizabeth Gaffney, and Jen […]