Readers Who Seek to Reflect on Holocaust Remembrance Day are Being Given the Opportunity with "The Discontinuity of Small Things,"
Readers who seek to reflect on Holocaust Remembrance Day, commemorated May 5 this year, are being given the opportunity with the recent release of The Discontinuity of Small Things (Quality Words In Print), an extraordinary new novel by Kevin Haworth, which is being called “a quiet book of the Holocaust”.
(PRWEB) April 29, 2005 -- Readers who seek to reflect on Holocaust
Remembrance Day, commemorated May 5 this year, are being given the opportunity
with the recent release of "The Discontinuity of Small Things" (Quality Words In
Print), an extraordinary new novel by Kevin Haworth, which is being called “a
quiet book of the Holocaust”.
Haworth, who currently lives in Athens,
Ohio, is accumulating early praise for the just-released novel, which detail the
lives of ordinary people living in Denmark during the German occupation in 1943.
According to Publisher’s Weekly, this “thoroughly imagined debut” is an
“engrossing historical novel [which] details a bright spot in a dark era.”
Kevin Haworth attributes his earliest inspirations for the novel to
observations he made at a photography exhibition:
“When I was in the
Masters program at Arizona State I came across a photo exhibit in the student
center - scenes from Denmark that had been important in the Danish Resistance
and the rescue of Jews. Most of the photos - taken fifty years after the fact -
showed empty spaces: a stretch of beach where Jews had stood; the pavement
outside a hospital where a man had fallen from a window.
I became
obsessed with filling in those spaces - empty holes into which great history had
once been pored. At the time I had never been to Denmark and knew little about
this small, marginalized Holocaust story. When I began to research and write,
first from books and photographs, then in Denmark itself, I found the kind of
contradictions that any writer would recognize as the stuff of fiction: An
occupation that involved almost no violence, and which the Germans described as
a “great understanding” between themselves and the Danish government. Jews who
fled and then returned to their homes as if little had transpired. A war waged
mostly by pamphlet.”
"The Discontinuity of Small Things" is a “quiet”
story of the Holocaust--a subtle story of fate, of interruptions, and of simple,
everyday hardships. In Denmark, the “lovely country by the sea”, fisherman,
students, and housewives are among those subject to the disquieting strictures
of martial law. Haworth shows how war sometimes begins in people’s lives as an
inconvenience, an interruption in the efficacy and ordering of small things,
then evolves into harrowing occasions, fateful moments of choice, heroism, or
cowardice. He reveals in his characters a consciousness that teems with both
immediacy and longing, compelling readers by depicting the delicate overlap of
memory, apprehension, and impulse. This novel, the product of eight years of
dedicated research and writing, marks his emergence as a significant new voice
in historical fiction.
Melissa Pritchard, a respected author and creative
writing instructor at the renowned Arizona State University Writer’s Program,
calls the work “a gorgeously realized novel” that “cries out to be read,
pondered and remembered for its tribute to and condemnation of a war that evoked
both immense evil and courage of heroic proportion.”
Author Kevin Haworth
was born in Brooklyn, New York. He earned his B.A. in English from Vassar
College and his M. F. A. in Fiction Writing from Arizona State University. A
two-time resident of the Vermont Studio Center, he is also a winner of the David
Dornstein Prize for Young Jewish Writers and the Permafrost Fiction Prize. He
currently teaches Writing and English Literature at Ohio University.
For
Additional Information or a Reader's Copy of "The Discontinuity of Small
Things," please contact Holly C. Gruber at Quality Words In Print, (714)
436-5700 or e-mail protected from spam bots.
"The Discontinuity of Small
Things" by Kevin Haworth (hardcover, 240 pages, $23.95) was published by Quality
Words In Print in May 2005, and is available through major internet booksellers
and selected bookstores.
Quality Words In Print is an independent
publisher of literary fiction and non-fiction based in Costa Mesa,
California.
Contact Information:
Holly Gruber
Quality Words In
Print
(714) 436-5700
e-mail protected from spam bots
www.qwipbooks.com
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Source : http://www.prweb.com/releases/2005/4/prweb233655.htm