UNITED STATES AUTHOR · BIOGRAPHY · HISTORICAL
Dean King
Dean King is an American author of narrative non-fiction on adventure, historical and maritime subjects. - Wikipedia
FEW EVENTS IN THE CONTINUING HISTORY OF LITERATURE are as satisfying as those moments when a writer, leaving behind the dissonance of experiment and imitation, finds his own authentic voice and settles into a lifetime of successful creativity in a style which he makes his own.
— from Patrick O'Brian
Most acclaimed
The Feud
1983
The saga of Carlo Reinhart, the quintessential American antihero, is a major accomplishment of modern literature and a history of our times. The sequence of novels begins with Crazy in Berlin and continues through Reinhart in Love, Vital Paris, and Reinhart's Women. Volume by volume, and as a series, it has received high praise. The place is small-town America and the time is the second half of the 1930's, when school boys found girls at summertime dances in the park, and many folks routinely kept a gun in the house for sporting purposes and/or self-defense. The Beekers, who live in Hornbeck have a series of encounters, ranging from the hostile to the amorous, with members of the Bullard family, who owns a hardware store in the adjoining hamlet of Millville. Prominent Bullards include Cousin Beaverton Kirby, who is reputed to be a redhead dick and packs a pistol to prove it, the childish, provocative Eva, a prematurely voluptuous teenager, and her feckless brother, called Junior, to whom trouble comes as naturally as ticks in a hound dog. The Beeker family consists of Tony, a nearsighted but hair-triggered athlete: his sluttish sister Bernice, who has been intimate with most of Hornbeck's male population, including the chief of police: their brother Jack, a reader of adventure tales, Peeping Tom, and moviegoer, their stout benevolent mother, and a father who carries his pride on his sleeve. While the Beekers and the Bullards are confronting or dodging one another, the standard village personages of the day-prating preachers, cops nice or nasty, lustful firemen, and even bank robbers-are going about their business.
Unbound
"For five hundred years, the Porters have concealed the existence of magic from the world. Now, old enemies have revealed the Porters' secrets, and an even greater threat lurks in the shadows. The would-be queen Meridiana, banished for a thousand years, has returned in the body of a girl named Jeneta Aboderin. She seeks an artifact created by Pope Sylvester II, a bronze prison that would grant her the power to command an army of the dead. Michigan librarian Isaac Vainio is powerless to stop her, having been stripped of his power and his place among the Porters by Johannes Gutenberg himself. But Isaac is determined to regain his magic and to rescue his former student Jeneta. With no magic of his own, Isaac must delve into the darker side of black-market magic, where he will confront beings better left undisturbed, including the sorcerer Juan Ponce de Leon. With his loyal fire-spider Smudge, dryad warrior Lena Greenwood, and psychiatrist Nidhi Shah, Isaac races to unravel a mystery more than a thousand years old as competing magical powers battle to shape the future of the world. He will be hunted by enemies and former allies alike, and it will take all his knowledge and resourcefulness to survive as magical war threatens to spread across the globe. Isaac's choices will determine the fate of his friends, the Porters, the students of Bi Sheng, and the world. Only one thing is certain: even if he finds a way to restore his magic, he can't save them all ..."--Publisher's website. Michigan librarian Isaac, stripped of his power, teams up with fire-spider Smudge, dryad warrior Lena, and psychiatrist Nidhi in order to stop a banished queen who has returned in the body of a young girl.
Patrick O'Brian
In 1991, when The New York Times Book Review proclaimed Patrick O'Brian the writer of "the greatest historical novels ever written," making him an overnight sensation in the United States, O'Brian was already in his mid-70s and had already had two distinct and remarkable writing careers. In less than a decade, O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin series, ultimately 20 novels strong, became an unprecedented literary juggernaut, with legions of devoted fans around America and around the world. With O'Brian's death in January 2000, curiosity about the carefully guarded secrets of his life has peaked. Here, Dean King tells the story of a man, an artist and an intellectual, born Richard Patrick Russ, who first achieves literary recognition as an adolescent, when he publishes a series of popular adventure stories. After the Second World War, he emerges as Patrick O'Brian, a writer of dark, sometimes tortured short stories and highly literary novels. He enjoys success as a translator, even as a biographer. Slowly, the O'Brian persona, forged in his own imagination and refined by years of rumor and speculation, takes form, until his ultimate triumphant arrival as a masterful historical novelist and chronicler of the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic wars. O'Brian's past -- both real and imagined -- is linked directly to his writing, as he drew deeply on the painful events of his early life. It has long been assumed that he himself was the model for the polymathic naval surgeon and intelligence agent Stephen Maturin, who, along with rough-and-tumble Captain Jack Aubrey, forms the heart of O'Brian's monumental roman-fleuve. The truth is more complex: each of these indelible characters is wholly original, yet in each we can hear deep echoes of O'Brian's own history. King's biography, the first ever of this famously secretive man, is an extraordinary achievement, a vivid, searing portrait of an intense and complex human being, whose grudges were as fiercely held as his loyalties; who was as famous for orneriness as he was for brilliant artistic creation; and whose encyclopedic knowledge of everything from ornithology to Catalan history delighted hundreds of thousands of readers and will surely enthrall generations to come. - Jacket flap.