Eric Larsen is the long-established author of the novels
An American Memory (winner of the 1988 Chicago Tribune $5000 Heartland Award),
I Am Zoë Handke (1992), and
The End of the 19th Century (2008)--three novels that will soon comprise a tetralogy called
Late USA when joined by their fourth part,
The Decline and Fall of the American Nation.
Larsen is also author of the important study of our national culture,
A Nation Gone Blind: America in an Age of Simplification and Deceit (2006).
From 1971 to 2006, Larsen was a member of the Department of English at John Jay College of Criminal Justice (CUNY). There, he taught writing and, more often as the years went on, surveys of literature modeled on the famous "Lit Hum" program of "great books" as it was taught at Columbia University for most of the last century. From this experience--of teaching literature "from Homer to Samuel Beckett" year after year--Larsen derived the idea of writing a series of books under the general title of "Great Literature for Regular People: A Course of Readings Drawn from a Life in the Classroom."
The first in this series is
Homer for Real: A Reading of the Iliad, now published by The Oliver Arts & Open Press. This is a book, as the Oliver Press web site puts it, that is "user-friendly but. . . [that] doesn't simplify." For his entire professional life--as novelist, teacher, and writer--Larsen has worked against the dangerous fallacies of simplification, as
A Nation Gone Blind: America in an Age of Simplification and Deceit vividly shows. In this new volume, Larsen presents the
Iliad in much the same way as he used to present it in his classes at John Jay--in a way such that anyone interested in the poem could follow, understand, and benefit from the reading of it.
To read the book's Introduction, please go here. To buy the book, go to its page on the Oliver Press web site, or to any brick and mortar bookseller in the U.S., U.K, or Europe, or to any online bookseller. To arrange for author interviews, to request review copies, or to ask for any other information about the book or its author, please contact Gabrielle LeMay, Publicity Director and Editorial Associate of The Oliver Arts & Open Press, at LeMayNYC@aol.com.
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