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Hailed by the San Francisco Chronicle as “a bright star in the literary sky,” Stephen Wright now extends his astonishing accomplishment with a Civil War novel unlike any.
Born in 1844 in bucolic upstate NY, Liberty Fish is the son of fervent abolitionists as well as the grandson of Carolina slaveholders even more focused on their cause. Thus follows a childhood limned with fugitive slaves moving through hidden passageways inside your home, his Uncle Potter’s free-soil adventure stories whose remarkable violence sets the tone of the mounting national crisis, and the inevitable distress that befalls his mother whenever letters arrive from her parents—a conflict that ultimately costs her her life and compels Liberty, in hopes of reconciling the familial disunion, to escape first into the cauldron of war and then into a bedlam more disturbing still.
Rich in characters both heartbreaking and bloodcurdling, comic and horrific, The Amalgamation Polka is shot through with politics and dreams, and it captures great swaths of the American experience, from village to metropolis to plantation, from the Erie Canal to the Bahamas, from Bloody Kansas to the fulfillment of the killing fields. Yet for all your brutality and tragedy, this novel is exuberant in the telling and its own wide compassion, brimming with the language, manners, hopes, and fears of its time—all this so transformed by Stephen Wright’s imaginative compass that places and events previously familiar are rendered new and strange, terrifying and stirring. Instantly revelatory, constantly mesmerizing, this is actually the work of a significant writer at the top of his form.
