Hind's Kidnap by Joseph McElroy
A long-ago kidnaping case all but abandoned resurfaces, yet its memory of lives put aside almost screens itself with a population of new life. Neighborhoods of New York, of Brooklyn Heights, a larger uncertain and disturbing America of the 1960s, this fable of a man’s obsession revisits people as clues while at the center, with deceptive scope, his temporarily estranged wife’s voice gathers and regathers what it is that he and she and their child have curiously going for them. All these unfolding circles of understanding in a mixed language distinctly American, by turns satirical, lyrical, eccentric, even a solvent at times simplifying the prevailingly urban as bucolic. A city pastoral Joseph McElroy called his second novel when it first appeared in 1969; now, a half century later, we may experience in Hind’s Kidnap a society reaching outward almost like a planet at risk, persons who would be dekidnaped to become ends in themselves, fiction as prophecy.
Publication Date: Sept 28, 2021
Paperback: 614 pages
ISBN: 9781950539314
Also available as an eBook
A long-ago kidnaping case all but abandoned resurfaces, yet its memory of lives put aside almost screens itself with a population of new life. Neighborhoods of New York, of Brooklyn Heights, a larger uncertain and disturbing America of the 1960s, this fable of a man’s obsession revisits people as clues while at the center, with deceptive scope, his temporarily estranged wife’s voice gathers and regathers what it is that he and she and their child have curiously going for them. All these unfolding circles of understanding in a mixed language distinctly American, by turns satirical, lyrical, eccentric, even a solvent at times simplifying the prevailingly urban as bucolic. A city pastoral Joseph McElroy called his second novel when it first appeared in 1969; now, a half century later, we may experience in Hind’s Kidnap a society reaching outward almost like a planet at risk, persons who would be dekidnaped to become ends in themselves, fiction as prophecy.
Publication Date: Sept 28, 2021
Paperback: 614 pages
ISBN: 9781950539314
Also available as an eBook
A long-ago kidnaping case all but abandoned resurfaces, yet its memory of lives put aside almost screens itself with a population of new life. Neighborhoods of New York, of Brooklyn Heights, a larger uncertain and disturbing America of the 1960s, this fable of a man’s obsession revisits people as clues while at the center, with deceptive scope, his temporarily estranged wife’s voice gathers and regathers what it is that he and she and their child have curiously going for them. All these unfolding circles of understanding in a mixed language distinctly American, by turns satirical, lyrical, eccentric, even a solvent at times simplifying the prevailingly urban as bucolic. A city pastoral Joseph McElroy called his second novel when it first appeared in 1969; now, a half century later, we may experience in Hind’s Kidnap a society reaching outward almost like a planet at risk, persons who would be dekidnaped to become ends in themselves, fiction as prophecy.
Publication Date: Sept 28, 2021
Paperback: 614 pages
ISBN: 9781950539314
Also available as an eBook
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JOSEPH MCELROY is the author of nine novels, including A Smuggler's Bible (Harcourt), Hind's Kidnap (Harper & Row), Ancient History: A Paraphase (Knopf), Lookout Cartridge (Knopf), Plus (Knopf), Women and Men (Knopf), The Letter Left to Me (Knopf), Actress in the House (Overlook), and Cannonball (Dzanc, 2013). He received the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and fellowships from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and D.H. Lawrence Foundations, twice from Ingram Merrill and twice from the National Endowment for the Arts. Among other universities he has taught at Columbia, Johns Hopkins, Northwestern, University of New Hampshire, Temple, NYU, the University of Paris, and the City University of New York. McElroy was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1930. He was educated at Williams College and Columbia University.
