Western Electric (John Simmons Short Fiction Award)

Literature & Fiction

Zancanella, Don

United States

University Of Iowa Press

A Storm in the Stars: A Novel of Mary Shelley

Romance

Delphinium Books

CONCORD tells the story of a single remarkable year when Henry David Thoreau and his brother John fall in love with the same girl; reclusive writer Nathaniel Hawthorne courts Sophia Peabody of the esteemed Peabody family; and the brilliant Margaret Fuller becomes a houseguest of the equally brilliant but married Ralph Waldo Emerson and finds herself engaged in a passionate affair of the mind as well as the heart. Today, these figures are icons of American literature but once they were young and in love.

Concord

Literary

Serving House Books

In London, early in the nineteenth century, five-year-old Mary Godwin, daughter of philosopher William Godwin, plays with her sister Fanny, mourns her deceased mother, and marvels as a hot air balloon lands not far from the Thames. Nearby, in Sussex, eleven-year-old Percy Shelley entertains his three sisters by telling them stories and performing tricks with chemicals and fire. 
A few years later Mary and Percy meet and fall in love in the Godwin bookshop near Black Friar’s Bridge. At first their romance seems doomed—Percy is a well-known atheist and already has a wife, and Mary is only seventeen and a under the care of her father and his overbearing second wife. But they consider such impediments trivial and are soon on their way to Ireland, to Switzerland, and across Europe (with Mary’s flighty half-sister Claire in tow). 
Upon reaching Lake Geneva they find lodgings near where the notorious poet Lord Byron and his peculiar personal physician John Polidori are staying—the same Lord Byron Claire seduced back in London, her reasoning being that if Mary can have a poet, why can’t she? And so begins the summer when Mary Shelley will begin writing her novel about a man who brings to life a creature of his own making, Percy and Lord Byron will debate politics and poetry in the midst of lightning storms, Polidori will begin writing his novel about a man with a taste for human blood, and snow will fall in the middle of July.

In London, early in the nineteenth century, five-year-old Mary Godwin, daughter of philosopher William Godwin, plays with her sister Fanny, mourns her deceased mother, and marvels as a hot air balloon lands not far from the Thames. Nearby, in Sussex, eleven-year-old Percy Shelley entertains his three sisters by telling them stories and performing tricks with chemicals and fire. A few years later Mary and Percy meet and fall in love in the Godwin bookshop near Black Friar’s Bridge. At first their romance seems doomed―Percy is a well-known atheist and already has a wife, and Mary is only seventeen and a under the care of her father and his overbearing second wife. But they consider such impediments trivial and are soon on their way to Ireland, to Switzerland, and across Europe (with Mary’s flighty half-sister Claire in tow). Upon reaching Lake Geneva they find lodgings near where the notorious poet Lord Byron and his peculiar personal physician John Polidori are staying―the same Lord Byron Claire seduced back in London, her reasoning being that if Mary can have a poet, why can’t she? And so begins the summer when Mary Shelley will begin writing her novel about a reanimated corpse, Percy and Lord Byron will debate politics and poetry in the midst of lightning storms, Polidori will begin writing his novel about a man with a taste for human blood, and snow will fall in the middle of July.

Genre Fiction

Animals of the Alpine Front

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Books by Zancanella, Don