K: A Novel - Ted O’Connell
Product Details:
Paperback: 318 pages
ISBN-13: 978-1733777735
About the Book:
Professor Francis Kauffman has unwittingly landed himself in prison where he’s faced with an insurmountable task: execute a fellow inmate. Charged with igniting a political insurrection amongst his students at a university in Beijing, Kauffman is sent to the notorious Kun Chong Prison, where his existence grows stranger by the hour as he struggles with the weight of his imprisonment and his incurable need to write about it in a place where art is forbidden, and the inmates must act as executioners. As cultures clash in his filthy, crowded cell, it soon becomes clear that he’s destined for a labor camp…or worse. Kauffman reflects on the turbulent family history that brought him to China, where he leads a solitary, expat life of soulless insurance jobs and all-night writing binges, only to wind up fighting a battle for his life inside the walls of Kun Chong.
About the Author:
Winner of the Tobias Wolff Award in Fiction, Ted O’Connell is a writer and musician whose creative products have been featured in literary magazines, taverns, and music halls throughout the country. He plays mandolin with the Prozac Mountain Boys and guitar with The Scarlet Locomotive, and has twice served as a visiting professor in China. Originally from the Chicago area, Mr. O’Connell lives in Bellingham, Washington with his wife and daughter. Find him on Instagram @writertedoconnell.
“K takes its readers on an extraordinary journey—through history and future, through innocence and experience, through hope and despair and then, most surprisingly, through the re-eruption of strange, flickering hope. O’Connell’s vision is long and aimed at salvation, though he flinches from none of the horrors humans visit on one another. K is a startling, beautiful book. Its nightmares will haunt readers, and its dreams will make them fly.”
“K: A Novel will worm its way into your soul. Much like Professor Francis Kauffman, the novel’s memorable protagonist, readers will feel both trapped and liberated. This is a novel for our times about the power of thought, art, truth, and expression and what it means to thrive when there are ‘no windows to or from any other world.’ A complete winner.”
“This compelling debut novel is an intricate portrait of a man trying to hold on to his own humanity while he grapples with the fact that he will likely never leave the walls of Kun Chong Prison.”
“Selected as one of the “most anticipated small press titles of 2020” by Big Other and one of the “most anticipated titles of 2020”