Norman Lock

“Norman Lock has created a memorable portrait gallery of American subjects, in a succession of audaciously imagined, wonderfully original, and beautifully written novels unlike anything in our literature.”
—Joyce Carol Oates

“Despite the American Novels’ dark subject matter, their impact is exhilarating as well as scarifying. In American Follies as in its predecessors, Lock’s supple, elegantly plain-spoken prose captures the generosity of the American spirit in addition to its moral failures, and his passionate engagement with our literary heritage evinces pride in its unique character possibly equal to his chagrin over our bloodstained past.”
—Washington Post

“[Lock’s fiction] shimmers with glorious language, fluid rhythms, and complex insights.”
—NPR

"All hail Lock, whose narrative soul sings fairy tales, whose language is glass."
—Kate Bernheimer

"[Lock's] prose is melodial, and alert to every signal from the unseen."
—Garielle Lutz

“One could spend forever worming through [Lock’s] magicked words, their worlds.”
—Believer

"Lock's weapon is words, and he uses them well....like a nightmare that wakes you up shaking, forcing you to reassess your life."
—LA Life

“[Lock] has an impressive ability to create a unique and original world.”
—Brian Evenson

"Lock’s language, though basically sleek and minimal, combines the high gloss and perspicuity of the Edwardian age with the robustness and vigor of American inventiveness, leavened by a facility for maximizing – to marvelous effect – the dichotomy between the sign and its object."
–– John Olson, First Intensity

"In truth? In truth, Lock writes it, Lish reads it! – which is a damn sight more than Lish will say for Proust."
–– Gordon Lish

“Lock writes some of the most deceptively beautiful sentences in contemporary fiction. Beneath their clarity are layers of cultural and literary references, profound questions about loyalty, race, the possibility of social progress, and the nature of truth . . . to create something entirely new―an American fable of ideas.
—Shelf Awareness

“The American Novels series, Norman Lock’s current multi-year, multi-volume project, is nothing short of his most ambitious endeavor yet . . . a fusion of all his preoccupations: fabulism, storytelling and the story of the telling, and the exploration of history, its discontents and malcontents.”
—Big Other

"In each volume [of the American Novels series] the first-person narrator functions as a kind of refractive lens, bending and blending together a generation of texts and ideas within a single mind, and yielding a spectrum of impressions on the development of American culture and identity.”
—Millions