About the Author
Stefan Merrill Block grew up in Plano, Texas. His first book, The Story of Forgetting, was an international bestseller and the winner of Best First Fiction at the Rome International Festival of Literature. Stefan's stories and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, NPR's Radiolab, GRANTA, The Los Angeles Times, and many other publications. Stefan lives in Brooklyn.
Featured books by Stefan Merrill Block
Oliver Loving
Oh, what a truly beautiful read this is, though do prepare for your heart to ache, weep, and possibly even break. For the last ten years, Oliver Loving has been lying in a hospital bed, paralysed and non-communicative, is he trapped in his own mind, can a new test release him? Everyone wants answers, they also want to know what happened ten years ago, on the night of the school dance in Bliss, Texas… and what caused the tragedy that took place there. The story focusses on Oliver, his mother Eve, and brother Charlie, and how one event has trapped them, has maimed them all. Stefan Merrill Block writes so thoughtfully, an almost gentle lyrical quality caresses the pages, yet he encourages searching questions, for you to travel deeper, to look further. This is an emotional read, the writing touched me, deep inside my heart, and a part of Oliver Loving will remain there. Almost otherworldly, yet raw and true and full of heart, Oliver Loving is profoundly moving, and captivating, I highly recommend stepping inside the pages, and becoming one with the story. ~ Liz Robinson
Other books by Stefan Merrill Block
Oliver Loving
Oh, what a truly beautiful read this is, though do prepare for your heart to ache, weep, and possibly even break. For the last ten years, Oliver Loving has been lying in a hospital bed, paralysed and non-communicative, is he trapped in his own mind, can a new test release him? Everyone wants answers, they also want to know what happened ten years ago, on the night of the school dance in Bliss, Texas… and what caused the tragedy that took place there. The story focusses on Oliver, his mother Eve, and brother Charlie, and how one event has trapped them, has maimed them all. Stefan Merrill Block writes so thoughtfully, an almost gentle lyrical quality caresses the pages, yet he encourages searching questions, for you to travel deeper, to look further. This is an emotional read, the writing touched me, deep inside my heart, and a part of Oliver Loving will remain there. Almost otherworldly, yet raw and true and full of heart, Oliver Loving is profoundly moving, and captivating, I highly recommend stepping inside the pages, and becoming one with the story. ~ Liz Robinson
Oliver Loving
One summer night, beneath the Perseid meteor shower, seventeen-year-old Oliver Loving's hand makes a first furtive journey across a Navajo picnic blanket towards his classmate Rebekkah Sterling's. A few months later, Hector Espina enters Bliss County Day School's gymnasium during homecoming and shoulders a hunting rifle. The thirty-five rounds he fires cut a leveling swathe through the past and future of Oliver, his family, and the entire population of Bliss, Texas. For the next nine years, Oliver is confined to a hospital bed. Conscious but totally paralyzed, he plumbs the depths of his own imagination, a twilit netherworld of myth, in search of meaning. Eve, his adoring and indomitable mother, holds a solemn, lonesome vigil. Vulnerable younger brother Charlie flees to New York where he desperately attempts to resurrect Oliver's consciousness using nothing but three weather-beaten journals full of unfinished poetry. Jed, Oliver's father, seems content to drink himself to death in a burnt out shack in the shadow of a resort hotel built on the land that is his birthright. But with the arrival of Professor McTeague from El Paso, towing along a new trailer-bound MRI machine and a revelation that Oliver's brain death may not be as complete as previously thought, a reckoning comes to Bliss and to the Loving family. Longtime grieving parent and newly minted experimental speech therapist Margot Strout descends, determined to make sure that Oliver reveals the truth about what happened that November night in this life or the next. What she finds, or claims to find, may prove the Lovings' salvation or push them forever into the outer darkness.
The Storm at the Door
Just outside Boston, in 1963, Frederick Merrill found himself a patient in the country's premiere mental hospital, a world of structured authority and absolute control - a forced regression to a simpler time even as the pace of the outside world accelerated into modernity. Meanwhile, in a wintry New Hampshire village hours to the north, Frederick's wife Katharine struggled to hold together her fracturing family and to heal from the wounds of her husband's affliction. Nearly fifty years later, a writer in his twenties attempts to comprehend his grandparents' story from that turbulent time, a moment in his family's history that continues to cast a long shadow over his own young life. Spanning generations and genres, The Storm at the Door blends memory and imagination, historical fact and compulsive storytelling, to offer a meditation on how our love for one another and the stories we tell ourselves allow us to endure. Quietly incisive and unflinchingly honest, The Storm at the Door juxtaposes the visceral physical world of Frederick's asylum with an exploration of how the subtlest damages can for ever alter a family's fate.
Aufziehendes Gewitter
Boston, 1962: Frederick wacht mit einem schlimmen Kater im Irrenhaus auf. Nur langsam fallt ihm wieder ein, was passiert ist ... Er wurde verhaftet, weil er altere Damen auf offener Strasse mit seinem nackten Hinterteil erschreckt hat. Um ihm einen Prozess zu ersparen und weil seine Frau Katharine seine manischen Schube einfach nicht mehr ertragen kann, steckt man ihn ins Mayflower Home, eine exklusive Anstalt, wo die High Society sich im Falle eines Falles kurieren lasst. Frederick glaubt eigentlich nicht, dass er krank ist - aber als er wieder gehen will, muss er feststellen, dass er daruber nicht mehr entscheiden kann. Und Katharine antwortet bald noch nicht einmal mehr auf seine Briefe. Brooklyn, 2010. Fast funfzig Jahre spater beschliet Stefan Merrill Block, seinem totgeschwiegenen Grovater eine Stimme zu geben.
The Story of Forgetting
Fifteen-year-old Seth Waller is devastated when his mother is diagnosed with a rare, early-onset form of Alzheimer's. When he was growing up, his mother always brushed aside questions about her past and family, and Seth realises that soon he will lose his chance to find out any more. He decides to uncover the truth about her life, their family history and the condition, and what he discovers is more surprising than he ever could have imagined. Inspired partly by Stefan Merrill Block's own family history, The Story of Forgetting is a moving and inspiring novel of love, loss, hope and genetic destiny.
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