Fiction. Set in a region of northern New Hampshire that in the 1830s declared itself an independent nation, JoshuaHarmon's debut novel traces the real and imagined travels of Martha Hennessy, a girl wishing for a life beyond her family's farm. QUINNEHTUKQUT interweaves Martha's story with those of dreamers and drifters whose lives intersect hers: an American soldier scarred by the first World War, a mythical and murderous tramp seeking lost Indian gold, a man haunted by his memories of Byrd's expeditions to Antarctica, an industrialist longing to become a woodsman, and an old woman forced to leave her home due to the planned flooding of a valley. A vivid study of the New England landscape, QUINNEHTUKQUT reveals how people inhabit place and how place inhabits people.
Author City: Poughkeepsie, NY USA
Joshua Harmon is the author of QUINNEHTUKQUT, a novel (2007), and SCAPE, a collection of poems (2009). His work has appeared in Antioch Review, Iowa Review, Southern Review, Verse, and other journals, and he has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts. He was educated at Cornell University and Marlboro College.
Reviews and Other Links
author blog
Alexander Nazaryan @ The Village Voice
John Cotter @ Open Letters Monthly
"Joshua Harmon has written a wonderful first novel, austere and beautiful, daringly original, and deeply mysterious, like history itself."
—David Means
"QUINNEHTUKQUT evokes the impressionistic sweep and lyrical beauty of The English Patient alongside the brilliant idiosyncratic vitality of Mason and Dixon. But Joshua Harmon is a thoroughly original writer, who is doing no less than reinventing storytelling before our eyes, by means of a dazzling, ever-shifting formal innovation, the primary allegiance of which is always to music. QUINNEHTUKQUT is mesmerizing line by line."
—Mary Caponegro
"Through a series of loosely linked fictions that toy with both the mythologizing and the dislocating effects of language, QUINNEHTUKQUT provides a mesmerizing picture of a place over time. Teasing a complex and compelling narrative out of a vast array of voices, documentation, and styles, this is historical fiction at its most eccentric and best."
—Brian Evenson
"Joshua Harmon's magical postmodern epic ranges across time, threading fragments of oral history, diaries, and news accounts into parallel tales of mystery, wonder, and tragedy. QUINNEHTUKQUT calls to mind the perceptive historical accuracy of W.G. Sebald and the experimental bravura of Sorrentino or Sukenick, but Joshua Harmon has fashioned a novel completely his own."
—Jayne Anne Phillips
"What survives and what is lost—frontiers, houses, towns, loves, parents, stories—is at the core of Harmon's stunning adventure in narrative, QUINNEHTUKQUT. Sentence by sentence, fragment by fragment, couplet by couplet he 'pushes back the darkness' creating 'a gorgeous signal along the horizon.'"
—Victoria Redel