Night Soil

(Paperback)

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Description

Family secrets, sexual explorations, art world wealth, and legacies of racism and environmental destruction collide in the new novel from Lambda Award-winning author Dale Peck. The art world falls in love with Dixie Stammers when it is discovered that not only are her pots mechanically perfect spheres, they are also identical, despite the fact that they are made entirely by hand, without benefit of a wheel, measuring device, or any other tool. Her teenage son, Judas, is pathologically shy, and retreats into a world of anonymous sexual encounters at a roadside rest area. What he really longs for though is a relationship with one of the boys at the private school he attends. The Academy was founded by Judas's ancestral grandfather, a nineteenth-century coal magnate. Driven by his mother's secretive nature, Judas begins digging into his family's history, and the Academy's, until he unearths a series of secrets that cause him to question everything he thought he knew about his world.

Reviews

The Millions Most Anticipated Fall Books of 2018
ABay Area ReporterBest Book of 2018

Praise for Night Soil

"You'd think it has been done before but it really hasn'tthe perfectly crafted, haunting and heartbreaking, raw, funny, unblinking yet merciful art novel."
Marlon James, author of Man Booker Prize-winningA Brief History of Seven Killings

"A remarkably layered and nuanced novel that explores many themes simultaneouslythe relationship between a single mother and her son, the repercussions of slavery and racism in America, the abuse of our natural environment, the search for a paternal role modelall through the life of a singularly unique gay character . . . Peck has done it with nuance and authenticity."
Lambda Literary

"A hilarious, thought-provoking, and lush novel about arts entanglement with Americas original sin."
The Millions

"A haunting and gorgeously written queer coming-of-age story."
The Waterloo Region Record

"A work of dizzying, profane, deeply comic imagination."
Bay Area Reporter

"[An] elegantly written sucker punch of a novel . . . Pecks moving, precisely rendered prose binds the reader to Judas with a knot tied so tightly that the character and the novel are impossible to forget."
Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

"A lush, provocative, and thought-provoking story of queer identity at the intersection of art, family history, capitalism, and the American racial order."
Kirkus Reviews,Starred Review

Dale PecksNight Soil, aportrait of the artist(s) as mother-and-son, is a feat of storytelling. Faulknerian in its mythmaking, Delany-esque in its candor, Pecks novel chronicles the queer, complex family history and present education of (birth-)marked narrator and insider-outsider, Judas 'Jude' Stammers. Vivid, multilayered and carnal, this novel never fails to surprise.
John Keene, author ofCounternarratives

"Night Soil is a novel about art, genius, capitalism, and the uncomfortable, full of the pleasures of the unbeautiful and the broken, from the only genius I know who could write it and live. An incisive, shrewd meditation on just what marks the limits of the human heart, and why."
Alexander Chee, author ofThe Queen of the Night

"Dale Pecks intriguing, challenging Night Soil blends parable and queer coming of age story. American history gets told as dynastic drama. It is a genealogical narrative that then drops open like a trap door into the history of consciousness. This is a compelling contemplation of the weird and human as well as a vigorous exploration of literary form."
Darryl Pinckney, author ofBlack Deutschland

Ive long thought nobody writes queer coming-of-age tales of love and longing like Dale Peck. We've been waiting a decade for another novel and Night Soil delivers on every level and more. This is a parable for a dead modern world that's built shakily atop an undying past, a mysterious family history where the personal and the political continually raise the stakes, and a lyrical modern mythology only a mind like Peck's can produce. Art, nature, race, gender, sexuality, all of it is reexamined in this fiction 2018 and onward cannot afford to skip. Riveting, mesmerizing, hauntingthe novel is so lucky to have Dale Peck back.
Porochista Khakpour, author ofSick: A Memoir

Dale Peck has written a brilliant, beautiful, provocative novel about art, society and human consciousness itself. In it he retraces many of the concerns that first made his name, while extending them into daring new realms. Peck has proven once again why he is among the most gifted of writers in the country.
Calvin Baker, author ofGrace

"Night Soilis a desperately funny, intensely smart novel that begins with a highly cloistered lifea young man growing up in the shadow of his mother's eccentric genius, and his family's equally eccentric boarding schooland grows into a story about the darkest secrets hidden in American landscapes. This was my first encounter with Dale Peck's fiction, and it made me want to go back and read everything he's written."
Jess Row, author of Your Face in Mine

"If I could pick one contemporary to write a novel about art and obsession, and families and obsession, and language and obsession, and cleanliness not being next to godliness but to very near something sinister, that person would be Dale Peck. And now hes gone and done it. Read it and writhe."
Rebecca Brown, author of The Gifts of the Body

"Night Soil is not like other books, not like any other books, not at all. Its excessive, preposterous, oddly-angled, exuberant, compulsive, stubborn, unseemly, unforgiving, indifferent to convention. Youre either going to love it or youre going to hate it. I know where I stand."
Jim Lewis, author ofThe King Is Dead

Praise for Dale Peck

An astonishing work of emotional wisdom . . . Peck has galvanized his reputation as one of the most eloquent voices of his generation.
TheNew York Times

The prose is so unobtrusively graceful that it may take you a while to notice how beautiful it is . . . Peck is as piercing on old age as on youth, as comfortable writing about womens bodies as about mens.
TheNew Yorker

Few writers have Dale Pecks nerve. He writes without secrets, packing his novels with theintimacies of his life, his family, his sexuality . . . There is an extraordinary sense of the risk andadventure of writing in every page of this novel.
The Nation

Shatteringly honest, disturbing and provocative . . . A masterful confrontation with truth in the guise of a brilliantly conceived and executed work of fiction.
San FranciscoChronicle

Peck delivers a novel that explores family, sexuality, AIDS, and the resiliency of the city, and he does it without kowtowing to the populist sentiment that a character ought to be likable: this one certainly isn't . . . In typical fashion, Peck spares no punches.
Lambda Literary Foundation

Author Bio

Dale Peck is the author of thirteen books in a variety of genres, including Visions and Revisions, Martin and John, Hatchet Jobs, and Sprout. His fiction and criticism have appeared in dozens of publications, and have earned him two O. Henry Awards, a Pushcart Prize, a Lambda Literary Award, and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship. He lives in New York City, where he has taught in the New School's Graduate Writing Program since 1999.