Mark Slouka Books In Order

Novels

  1. God’s Fool (2002)
  2. The Visible World (2007)
  3. Brewster (2013)

Collections

  1. Lost Lake (1998)
  2. All That Is Left Is All That Matters (2018)

Non fiction

  1. War of the Worlds (1995)
  2. Essentialism (1999)
  3. Essays from the Nick of Time (2010)
  4. Real Life (2010)
  5. Nobody’s Son (2016)

Novels Book Covers

Collections Book Covers

Non fiction Book Covers

Mark Slouka Books Overview

God’s Fool

Born attached at the chest, Chang and Eng were considered a marvel, an omen, an act of God, evidence of His glory or proof of His wrath. Uniquely cursed, enslaved to one another for life, they were a joke of nature variously feared and abhorred, disturbing our most basic assumptions about the human condition. Mark Slouka’s dazzling achievement in God s Fool is the ease and compassion with which he draws the story of one human being from this ghastly predicament. Looking beyond the twins physical connection, he imagines one man s life of ordinary grace and suffering, longing and resistance, and the ties of love, as well as of blood, that bind and redeem us all. By any standard, theirs is a history of epic variety and drama. Their birth, to an illiterate fishmonger, sent midwives screaming from the room. Condemned to death, they survived to be brought, at the age of thirteen, to the Royal Palace in Bangkok for an audience with King Rama III. At seventeen, laboring as merchants on the Meklong River, they saw their world erased by a typhoon. Consigned for three hundred pounds to an opium trader by their mother, who was desperate to ensure their survival, they sailed for Europe. There they entertained kings and counselors in salons and drawing rooms from Brussels to Rome, and, in Paris, met the woman who would divide them as no surgeon ever could. When the culture that had lifted them up inevitably cast them down, they landed in the flophouses of London, where, penniless and starving, they were discovered by Phineas T. Barnum, who packed them off to America along with an assortment of bearded ladies and two headed calves, albino beauties and dog boys, German midgets and twelve fingered flute players. Leaving Barnum at the height of their fame to take a last stab at normal life, they settled in North Carolina, where, despite the tensions growing between them, they found, for a time, tranquillity as farmers and slave owners, marrying a pair of sisters and fathering, between them, twenty children. Their peace, however, would prove to be short lived. As the Civil War drew closer, and their world began to tilt, they would first turn against each other and then, faced with a trial unlike any they had ever known, draw together once more. No longer young, they set off to find the war, and to save what could be saved. It would be there, on that very real battlefield, that Chang would enact his final, terrifying battle with fate. Sweeping and intimate, vibrant and austere, God s Fool is a novel of soaring ambition and accomplishment from a fiercely gifted storyteller.

The Visible World

The Visible World is an evocative, powerfully romantic novel about a son’s attempt to understand his mother’s past, a search that leads him to a tragic love affair and the heroic story of the assassination of a high ranking Na*zi by the Czech resistance. The narrator of The Visible World, the American born son of Czech immigrants living in New York, grows up in an atmosphere haunted by fragments of a past he cannot understand. At the heart of that past is his mother, Ivana, a spontaneous, passionate woman drifting ever closer to despair. As an adult, the narrator travels to Prague, hoping to learn about a love affair between his then young mother and a member of the resistance named Tomas, an affair whose untimely end, he senses, lay behind Ivana’s unhappiness. Ultimately unable to complete his knowledge of the past, he imagines the two lovers as participants in one of the more dramatic and true moments of the war, and through the deeply romantic story he tells, creates not only the ending of their story but the beginning of his own. The Visible World is a literary page turner and an immensely moving novel about the vagaries of love and our need to make sense of life through the telling of stories.

Lost Lake

In twelve beautifully imagined stories linked by character and setting, Mark Slouka paints an un forgettable portrait of three generations of men and women under the spell of a landscape with a powerful history, and of a body of water that has a grip on their souls and destinies, defying their understanding even as it elevates and transforms their lives. Set in a tiny Czech community on the shores of New York’s Lost Lake, the stories in Mark Slouka’s first collection are elegiac and expansive, illuminated by a quiet, complicated glory in the natural world and by the mysterious motions of the human spirit within it. In ‘Genesis,’ the collection’s creation myth, an inspired young war veteran gazes into a cow pasture and sees the lake for the first time, and in it the chance it holds for a better life; in the exquisitely written fishing story ‘The Shape of Water,’ a young boy’s recollection of a momentous catch occasions a later reflection on the elusiveness of memory and the power of invented truths; in ‘The Exile,’ a young woman struggles unsuccessfully against an adulterous passion and in the dead of night rows out across the lake to meet her lover on the opposite shore. In all, Lost Lake emerges as a place of epic significance and enduring simplicity, the source and the settling point of all stories less a body of water than a notion, a dwelling place, a spiritual home.

War of the Worlds

Warning: A technological revolution is unfolding that promises, in the words of its creators, to redefine what it means to be human. Face to face communication F2F to those in the know is quickly becoming obsolete; already we turn to computers for information, entertainment, companionship even love. Science fiction? Hardly. This is the brave new vision of the digital avant garde, computer crusaders leading a high tech assault on what was once known as reality. Sophisticated, well funded, unabashedly messianic, they have the power, the technological know how, and the marketplace savvy to make good on many of their wildest prophecies. With War of the Worlds, Mark Slouka gives us a funny, but eerily disturbing, humanist’s look at the culture of cyberspace.

Essays from the Nick of Time

A new collection of prophetic essays from one of the sharpest practitioners of the formMark Slouka writes from a particular vantage point, one invoked by Thoreau, who wished to improve the nick of time…
to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future. At this bewildering convergence, Slouka asks us to consider what it means to be human and what we must revive, or reject, in order to retain our humanity in the modern world. Collected over fifteen years, these essays include fascinating explorations of the relationship between memory and history and the nature of tragedy in a media driven culture; meditations on the transcendent wisdom of the natural world and the role of silence in an age of noise; and arguments in defense of the political value of leisure time and the importance of the humanities in an age defined by the language of science and industry. Written in Slouka’s supple and unerring prose, celebratory, critical, and passionate, Essays from the Nick of Time reawakens us to the moment and place in which we find ourselves, caught between the fading presence of the past and the neon lure of the future.

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