(Editor’s Note: It’s a special treat for us to welcome a brand new sponsor today at KND, in the form of an innovative, mission-driven publishing company called Open Road Integrated Media. We’ve been writing about Open Road since it was founded in the fall of 2009 by former HarperCollins CEO and Random House executive Jane Friedman. While many of her former colleagues were investing their energies in developing the agency model conspiracy that would eventually win them defendant status in a federal antitrust action, Friedman took a very different, courageous — and I would say brilliant — route with co-founder Jeffrey Sharp to use the new technologies offered by the Kindle and other platforms to connect the greatest readers in the world with legendary authors including William Styron, Pat Conroy, Jack Higgins, and Virginia Hamilton, emerging stars like Mary Glickman, and today’s featured author, Bradford Morrow. If you love to read and you have yet to discover Open Road’s Kindle list of over 1,200 titles, you are in for a truly special treat featuring great reading at great prices. But there’s no better place to start than with Fall of the Birds. –Steve Windwalker)
“What’s with the robins this year?”
“Morrow . . . is a mesmerizing storyteller who casts an irresistible spell.” —Joyce Carol Oates
“Literary fiction [is Morrow’s] particular, individual gift.” —The New York Times Book Review
“Morrow is a landscape painter of contemporary fiction; like his counterparts of a century ago, he evokes a certain mood and even momentum . . . by the scenes he chooses.” —The Boston Globe
Check out the publisher’s website to learn more about Open Road and view a brief but dramatic video introduction to Fall of the Birds.
Here’s the set-up:
A new novella by acclaimed author Bradford Morrow about a man who tracks an inexplicable plague of bird deaths, and the mystery’s profound effect on his family
Hundreds of red-winged blackbirds are discovered scattered, lifeless, around a greenhouse in Warwick, New York. Heaps of common grackles litter the fields of a farm upstate near Stone Ridge. And in Manhattan, a Washington Square restaurant is forced to close its doors when a flock of pigeons inexplicably dies on the sidewalks out front. From Pennsylvania to Maine, birds are falling from the sky en masse—and nobody can figure out why.
An insurance claims adjuster and avid birder is one of the first to recognize that something is wrong. His stepdaughter, Caitlin, has also noticed—their common interest in birds is one of the few things they share these days, since her mother died of cancer just six months ago. As they travel the Northeast together to investigate the ominous deaths, a bond forms that might prove strong enough to mend their broken family.
Fall of the Birds is a moving story of a haunting near-future and a tribute to the power of love that can survive even the most harrowing of circumstances.
Praise For FALL OF THE BIRDS:
“…Fall of the Birds is a beautifully crafted novella about love and loss, about the overwhelming sorrow and loneliness of grief and the sense of wrongness of the universe that comes with it. But it is also about the resilience of the human spirit to cope and to transcend tragedy and to form strong and lasting bonds despite or because of it. And, oh yeah, it’s a pretty darn good story about birds as well.” – Maxine McLister, Amazon Reviewer, 5 Stars
About The Author
Bradford Morrow has lived for the past thirty years in New York City and rural upstate New York, though he grew up in Colorado and lived and worked in a variety of places in between. While in his mid-teens, he traveled through rural Honduras as a member of the Amigos de las Americas program, serving as a medical volunteer in the summer of 1967. The following year he was awarded an American Field Service scholarship to finish his last year of high school as a foreign exchange student at a Liceo Scientifico in Cuneo, Italy. In 1973, he took time off from studying at the University of Colorado to live in Paris for a year. After doing graduate work on a Danforth Fellowship at Yale University, he moved to Santa Barbara, California, where he worked as a bookseller until relocating to New York City in 1981, where he began editing the literary journal “Conjunctions” and writing novels.
His first five novels–“Come Sunday” (1988), “The Almanac Branch” (1992, PEN/Faulkner Award finalist), “Trinity Fields” (Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist, 1995), “Giovanni’s Gift” (1997) and “Ariel’s Crossing” (2002)–are all available as e-books from Open Road Media.
In collaboration with eighteen artists, Morrow is the author of “A Bestiary,” as well as a book for children, “Didn’t Didn’t Do It,” illustrated by the legendary Gahan Wilson. Morrow has also edited and written a number of other books, including “Posthumes” (poetry), “The New Gothic” (with Patrick McGrath) and “The Complete Poems of Kenneth Rexroth” (with Sam Hamill) and has contributed to many anthologies and journals. As founding editor of “Conjunctions,” he has edited over 55 volumes of the journal from 1981 to the present. An anthology on death, “The Inevitable: Contemporary Writers Confront Death,” co-edited with David Shields, will be published by W.W. Norton in February 2011.
His new novel, “The Diviner’s Tale,” is published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in the U.S. and in England with Corvus (Atlantic), as well as an audiobook with Blackstone. His first collection of short stories, “Lush,” will be published in Fall 2011 by Pegasus Books. He is completing work on his seventh novel, “The Prague Sonata,” as well as a book of creative nonfiction works, “Meditations on a Shadow.”
Morrow’s many awards include an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, O. Henry and Pushcart Prizes, as well as the PEN/Nora Magid Award. He has taught at Princeton, Columbia, and Brown Universities and for the past twenty years has been a Bard Center Fellow and professor of literature at Bard College.
(This is a sponsored post.)