American Meteor

P
RAISE FOR

Norman Lock

“One could spend forever worming through [Lock’s] magicked words, their worlds.”

—
The Believer

“No other writer in recent memory, lives up to [Whitman’s] declaration that behind every book there is a hand reaching out to us, a hand to be held onto, a hand that has the power to touch us, to make us feel.”

—
Detroit
Metro Times

“Lock is a rapturous storyteller, and his tales are never less than engrossing.”

—
Kenyon Review

“One of our country’s unsung treasures.”

—
Green Mountains Review

“Our finest modern fabulist.”

—
Bookslut

“A master storyteller.”

—
Largehearted Boy

“[A] contemporary master of the form [and] virtuosic fabulist.”

—
Flavorwire

“[Lock’s] window onto fiction [is] a welcome one: at once referential and playful, occupying a similar post-Borges space to . . . Stephen Millhauser and Neil Gaiman.”

—
Vol. 1 Brooklyn

“[Lock] is not engaged in either homage or pastiche but in an intense dialogue with a number of past writers about the process of writing, and the nature of fiction itself.”

—
Weird Fiction

“Lock’s work mines the stuff of dreams.”

—
Rumpus

“You can feel the joy leaping off the page.”

—
Full Stop

“Lock plays profound tricks, with language—his is crystalline and underline-worthy.”

—
Publishers Weekly

“Lock’s stories stir time as though it were a soup . . . beyond the entertainment lie 21
^st
-century conundrums: What really exists? Are we each, ultimately, alone and lonely? Where is technology taking humankind?”

—
Kirkus Reviews

“Lock writes some of the most deceptively beautiful sentences in contemporary fiction. Beneath their clarity are layers of cultural and literary references, profound questions about loyalty, race, the possibility of social progress, and the nature of truth.”

—
Shelf Awareness

“All hail Lock, whose narrative soul sings fairy tales, whose language is glass.”

—
Kate Bernheimer
, editor of
xo Orpheus: Fifty New Myths, My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me,
and
Fairy Tale Review

“[Lock] has an impressive ability to create a unique and original world.”

—
Brian Evenson
, author of
Windeye
and
Immobility

“Lock is one of our great miniaturists, to be read only a single time at one’s peril.”

—
Tim Horvath
, author of
Understories

“A writer exquisite in the singularity (read for this ‘genius’) of his utterance.”

—
Gordon Lish

A
MERICAN
M
ETEOR

Also by Norman Lock

Fiction

    
A History of the Imagination

    
Joseph Cornell’s Operas / Émigrés

    
Trio

    
Notes to ‘The Book of Supplemental Diagrams’ for Marco Knauff’s Universe

    
Land of the Snow Men

    
The Long Rowing Unto Morning

    
The King of Sweden

    
Shadowplay

    
Grim Tales

    
Pieces for Small Orchestra & Other Fictions

    
Escher’s Journal

    
Love Among the Particles
(Bellevue Literary Press)

    
The Boy and His Winter
(Bellevue Literary Press)

    
Dutch Stories

Stage Plays

    
Water Music

    
Favorite Sports of the Martyrs

    
The House of Correction
*
(Broadway Play Publishing Co.)

    
The Contract

    
The Sinking Houses
*

    
The Book of Stains
*

    
The Monster in Winter

Radio Plays

    
Women in Hiding

    
The Shining Man
†

    
The Primate House

    
Let’s Make Money

    
Mounting Panic

Poetry

    
Cirque du Calder

    
In the Time of Rat

Film

    
The Body Shop

*
Published in
Three Plays

†
Published in
Two Plays for Radio

First published in the United States in 2015 by