Orchard Park

Description:

Russell Huggins has died an indigent's death but left behind a formidable literary estate. Tom Shaw has been enlisted by The University of Maryland's Urban Archaeology Department to decipher and distill, catalogue and compile, Huggins' vast collection of single-spaced, handwritten journals and ledgers littering the second floor of Button House, a dilapidated mansion on the outskirts of Orchard Park, a Baltimore suburb. Is it but a case of riotous hypergraphia or does the University's adamancy suggest something else? *Orchard Park* tells the tale of one man's effort to scratch at the canvas; to peel away life’s protective layers; to decrypt meaning from the cultural artifacts by which he is surrounded -- to achieve grace through creation and redemption through imagination.

subjects: Magic Realism,  Trobar clus,  roman à clef,  Transcendental Fascism,  Meta-Narrative,  Literary Fiction,  Cryptography,  Narrative Cryptography,  Information Management,  Literary Criticism,  Experimental Novel,  Narrative Poetry,  Film Theory,  Elitism,  Aristocracy

People: Tom Fahy,  George Irwin,  James A. Trainer,  David Duff

Places: Baltimore,  Washington,  New York,  Geneva,  Srebrenica

Times: 1998-2003