Taking its inspiration from Great Expectations, this novel teases us with the question of what Pip might have been like had he grown up in the American South of the 1960s and 1970s and faced the explosive social issues—racial injustice, a war abroad, women’s and gay rights, class struggle—that galvanized the world in those decades.
A guilty encounter with an escaped felon, a summer spent working for an eccentric man with a mysterious past, conflicted erotic feelings for his employer’s niece and nephew—these events set the stage for a journey of sexual and moral discovery that takes Newt Seward to New England, Rome, and Paris—all before returning home to confront his life’s many expectations and disappointments.
Deftly combining elements of coming-of-age story, novel of erotic discovery, Southern Gothic fiction, and detection-mystery thriller, Furnace Creek leaps the frame of Dickens’s masterpiece to provide a contemporary meditation on the perils of desire, ambition, love, loss, and family.
Joseph Allen Boone is the author of three works of nonfiction and the libretto for a musical based on Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man. Boone is the recipient of fellowships and residencies from the Guggenheim Foundation, National Humanities Center, Stanford Humanities Center, Rockefeller-Bellagio Center, the Bogliasco Foundation, the American Council for Learned Societies, and the Huntington Library. A resident of Los Angeles, California, Boone is an endowed professor of English at the University of Southern California.View all by Joseph Allen Boone
