One of the several wonderful reviews of Autumn Lamp in

Rain catches the vastness that is contained within this small and humble volume. "Ana" writes that

I never knew what happened in Asia until I read this book. It is amazingly relevant to the world today. This should be required reading for any modern history or Asian/Asian-American studies/literature class. Gorgeous. Searing. Thank you Han Glassman for your unique and incredibly moving poems.  

"Frank D.," similarly, also immediately senses the scope of the volume:

"With a breath that fuses east and west, and a voice that echo's Eliot and Yeats, Glassman draws us into the pain of her two worlds: the loss of her Korean sisters in war during her youth and the life and death of her beloved husband--himself a holocaust survivor--many years later. Like many great poets she sees the hope for redemption resting in tears and blood.
 

And "Grady Means," one of several more reviewers, echoes these same ideas even more strongly:

"Autumn Lamp in Rain tells a heart-rending story about a Korean family torn apart by the Japanese Occupation, World War II, and the subsequent [Korean War]. It is also a story of war-scarred human survival and resurrection as the poetess marries a Jewish Romanian holocaust survivor in America and raises a very successful family ... [She] writes her story in poems. The poems evoke the fear, quiet heroism, and life-long memories and scars of the war and brutal ultra-nationalism of the 20th Century, that many of us only have a distant knowledge of. The poems evoke the family history in Korea, simultaneously combined with feelings of fear, uncertainty, and occasional despair and alienation of a very difficult life moved to a modern, Western city. The ghosts of the past are always with us. Appropriately, the poems have a Western structure with images and allusions from East Asia, which combine to provide the very powerful and very human impact of a complex woman telling a very personal story in a way that should speak to any sensitive and civilized person hoping that humanity can learn from its history - in this case, some of its worst history - and give a better life to its children."

Look for yourself to see the whole of what the reviewers have said about this enormous little book.  And then, to get your own copy to have and hold, go either to Amazon or directly to Oliver. As "Frank D" said, "You'll be better for it."
 

The Oliver Arts & Open Press has published The End of the 19th Century, the third in what its authorconceives of as a tetralogy of novels consisting of An American Memory  (1988), I Am Zoe Handke (1994), The End of the 19th Century (originally 2008 but out of print, now reissued), and The Decline and Fall of the American Nation (completed 2001, unpublished).

The four novels have certain elements in common, among them the character of Malcolm Reiner, who is often (though not always) the books' narrator; the southern Minnesota town of West Tree, which is Malcolm's birthplace and his life's first historical subject; and Malcolm's continuing fascination with the history of familes, the passage of time, and the nature of place.

The fictional town of West Tree is drawn from the actual town of Northfield, Minnesota, birthplace of the author, Eric Larsen.

Larsen's novels have received praise for the nature and quality of their writing in them.

Of An American Memory, it was remarked that "Eric Larsen speaks in a distinctive voice, penetrating in perception and ripe with melody," and Dinitia Smith, in  the New York Times, said that "Larsen has written this novel in language as sparse and wind-riven as the Midwest of his imagination."

Of I Am Zoe Handke, the writer Ruth Moose said: "Marvelous, marvelous work. If you love literature, writing so wonderful it makes you catch your breath, read Zoe Handke," while Bob Moyer concluded: "Exquisite, elegant, exceptional--just a few of the words which all together do not add up to an adequate description of Eric Larsen's companion novel to 'An American Memory,' his prize-winning first novel about Malcolm Reiner. Zoe is the woman Reiner married at the conclusion of that novel, and her story, which complements his but still stands on its own, can only be summed up suitably with one word--classic."

And of The End of the 19th Century, Jane Vandenberg, author of the novel Failure to Zigzag and of A Pocket History of Sex in the Twentieth Century, wrote that "The writing here is simply stunning. What this novel chronicles is the complete loss of the American agrarian past and with it all sense of rootedness and connectedness. It is an important, if apocalyptic, work, its writer gifted with genius. Please don't let it go."

Read more about the novel here.

Get a copy at Amazon, Barnes & Nobel, Powells, or through any bookstore.

Or, if you like,  buy it for your Kindle.

ABOUT ERIC LARSEN

Eric Larsen was born in Northfield, Minnesota, in 1941. He was educated in the Northfield public schools and then at Carleton College. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Iowa in 1971, where he took credits both in the Department of English and  in the Iowa Writers' Workshop. From 1971 until 2006, he was a member of the Department of English at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY. His first novel, An American Memory, won the Chicago Tribune's inaugural Heartland Prize, given each year--beginning in 1988--to the best book from or about the American middle west. Larsen is author also of A Nation Gone Blind: America in an Age of Simplification and Deceit (2006), Homer for Real: A Reading of The Iliad (2009), and The Skull of Yorick: The Emptiness of American Thinking at a Time of Grave Peril--Studies in the Cover-up of 9/11 (2011). He is the founding editor and publisher of The Oliver Arts & Open Press.