Arc d'X: A Novel

Steve Erickson

Apr 2013 · Open Road Media

About this eBook

DIVDIVIn a desperate effort to liberate herself, a fourteen-year-old slave—mistress to the man who invented America—finds herself flung into a different time and world/divDIV
Steve Erickson’s provocative reimagining of American history, Arc d’X begins with the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. With “skin . . . too white to be quite black and too black to be quite white,” Sally is loved only to the extent that she can be possessed, and finds hope only in the promise that her children’s lives will be different from her own. The couple’s paradox-riven union echoes through the ages and in an alternate epoch where time plays by other rules. In Aeonopolis, a theocratic city at the foot of a volcano, priests seek to have Sally indicted, and in an emptied-out Berlin, the Wall is being rebuilt. Dizzyingly imaginative, Arc d’X is an unrivaled exploration of “the pursuit of happiness.”
/div/div

About the author

DIVDIVSteve Erickson is the acclaimed author of several novels, including Tours of the Black Clock, The Sea Came in at Midnight, and Zeroville. Regarded as a central figure in the avant-pop movement, Erickson has been compared to J. G. Ballard and Don DeLillo, and praised by Thomas Pynchon, for his deeply imaginative fiction. In addition to his novels, he has published two works of nonfiction about American politics and culture and has written for the New York Times Magazine, Esquire, and Rolling Stone. The recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, he is presently the film critic for Los Angeles magazine and editor of the literary journal Black Clock. /div/div