Kings of the Earth is on its way...

A few months back, Random House acquired my second novel, Kings of the Earth, for publication in July of 2010.

Here's the jacket copy...

"Following up Finn—his much-heralded and prize-winning debut whose voice evoked “the mythic styles of his literary predecessors...William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, Cormac McCarthy and Edward P. Jones” (San Francisco Chronicle)—Jon Clinch returns with Kings of the Earth, a powerful and haunting story of life, death, and family in rural America.

The edge of civilization is closer than we think.

It’s as close as a primitive farm on the margins of an upstate New York town, where the three Proctor brothers live together in a kind of crumbling stasis. They linger like creatures from an older, wilder, and far less forgiving world—until one of them dies in his sleep, and the other two are suspected of murder.

Told in a chorus of voices that span a generation, Kings of the Earth examines the bonds of family and blood, faith and suspicion that link not just the brothers but their entire community.

Vernon, the oldest brother, is reduced by work and illness to a shambling shadow of himself. Feebleminded Audie lingers by his side, needy and unknowable. And Creed, the youngest of the three and the only one to have seen anything of the world (courtesy of the U.S. Army), struggles with impulses and accusations beyond his understanding. We meet Del Graham, a state trooper torn between his urge to understand the brothers and his desire for justice; Preston Hatch, a neighbor who’s spent his life protecting the three men from themselves; and a host of other living, breathing characters whose voices emerge to shape this sprawling but deeply intimate saga of life, death, and the human condition at its limits."

Available Now for Pre-Order...

Wendy Clinch's debut novel—DOUBLE BLACK: A SKI DIVA MYSTERY—is coming to your favorite bookstore on Jauary 5, 2010.

It's about a young woman who heads for a Vermont ski town to pursue the ski-bum lifestyle, only to stumble on financial intrigue, bitter family warfare, and murder. It has lots of quirky characters and loads of New England atmosphere, and it stars a young woman with nerve, spunk, and a sense of humor about it all.

Here's the first line:

"When Stacey Curtis found the dead man in the bed, she knew it was time to get her own apartment."

That kind of dares you not to read on, don't you think? I guarantee it'll be worth your time. DOUBLE BLACK is a lot of fun for skiers and non-skiers alike. And as of today, you can pre-order it at Amazon.com.

Download "The Dog," free.

"The Dog," a story that might be considered a missing chapter from Finn, is now available on my web site as a free download. It's also a low-priced eBook for Amazon's Kindle, but I wanted to make it available to folks who haven't yet caught up with that particular technology.

Folks like myself, that is...

HUCK has "The Raftsmen's Passage." Now FINN has "The Dog."

Just before Huckleberry Finn went to press, Mark Twain's publisher asked him to remove an episode from near the start of Chapter 16. The deleted pages showed Huck eavesdropping on a group of raftsmen by night, and over time became known to scholars as "The Raftsmen's Passage" or "The Raft Chapter." The material appeared in Life on the Mississippi, and was first restored to Huck in a 1944 edition.

(For more details, along with a million other interesting things about Twain and his world, check out Kent Rasmussen's encyclopedic, two-volume Critical Companion to Mark Twain.)

Now, a missing piece of Finn has surfaced. Its provenance is different from "The Raftsmen's Passage," though; instead of being omitted from the original novel, it arrived afterward.

Readers of Finn know that many events in the novel spring from the memorable moment when Huckleberry Finn found his father's dead body—naked and bloody—in a floating house. Transposed into my book, the peculiar objects in that death room—whiskey bottles, a baby's bottle, men's and women's clothing, two black cloth masks, a wooden leg—appear along the twisted trail of Finn's life.

There was a dog collar in that room, too. And it got me thinking.

The result—"The Dog"—is available now for Amazon's Kindle. It sells for about a dollar, and you can be reading it in a few seconds.

New Novel Coming Soon

Kings of the Earth, my new novel, just sold to Random House.

Here's the run-down...

Impoverished, illiterate, and rooted to the land, the three Proctor brothers have lived and worked together since childhood. When one dies and another is suspected of his murder, the community begins to talk. KINGS OF THE EARTH is a story of life and death and what comes after, on a hardscrabble farm in upstate New York.

An upstate native myself, I don't mind telling you that the wellspring of this novel is the tragedy of the Ward brothers, a case that was the subject of national news coverage and a documentary film, Brother's Keeper, in the 1990's. My father grew up down the road from the Ward brothers, although he—unlike his old neighbors—is still among the living.

No publication date has been set for Kings of the Earth. Watch this space...

Finn Visits Quarry Farm

Every two years, the Center for Mark Twain Studies at Elmira College hosts the International Conference on the State of Mark Twain Studies.

Among the scholars on deck for the 2009 conference is Takuya Kubo, Associate Professor at Japan's Kanazawa University. Professor Kubo specializes in 19th century American Literature, chiefly the work of Mark Twain, and his approach to Twain is an interesting one: He considers Twain's work through the lens of Masculinity Studies. The title of his conference paper is "Turn Us into Real Men: Mark Twain and his Incomplete Masculine Education."

A pdf of the full conference program is here.

All of this is by way of noting that Kubo found Finn an interesting exploration and expansion of Huck's possible masculine roots. And that's by way of explaining the photo seen above: Professor Kubo, reading Finn on the porch at Twain's beloved Quarry Farm, the very location where Huckleberry Finn himself was born.

What a world.

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