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Spiegel & Grau
March 2011
On Sale: March 1, 2011
336 pages
ISBN: 0812981588
EAN: 9780812981582
Hardcover
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Fiction
A comic journey into the ultimate land of whiteness by an unlikely band of African American adventurers Recently canned professor of American literature Chris Jaynes is obsessed with The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, Edgar Allan Poeβs strange and only novel. When he discovers the manuscript of a crude slave narrative that seems to confirm the reality of Poeβs fiction, he resolves to seek out Tsalal, the remote island of pure and utter blackness that Poe describes with horror. Jaynes imagines it to be the last untouched bastion of the African Diaspora and the key to his personal salvation. He convenes an all-black crew of six to follow Pymβs trail to the South Pole in search of adventure, natural resources to exploit, and, for Jaynes at least, the mythical world of the novel. With little but the firsthand account from which Poe derived his seafaring tale, a bag of bones, and a stash of Little Debbie snack cakes, Jaynes embarks on an epic journey under the permafrost of Antarctica, beneath the surface of American history, and behind one of literatureβs great mysteries. He finds that here, there be monsters.
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