Michael Bible Livres

"The Ancient Hours […] packs a wallop" —New York Times Book Review "The Ancient Hours is brilliant.” —Bud Smith, author of Work "Bible is a fantastic writer." —Kevin Wilson, author of Nothing to See Here Harmony, North Carolina is a typical town—full of saints and sinners you can’t tell apart... Its history echoes with lynchings and shootings; mob violence and vigilante justice. But those are just whispers of a past lost to time. The summer of 2000 was different. Iggy in the Baptist church. Gasoline and a match. Twenty-five people dead. This, Harmony couldn’t forget. Told in a kaleidoscope of timelines and voices, Michael Bible examines every dimension of a tragic but all-too-American story in The Ancient Hours. The victims, witnesses, perpetrators, and condemned comingle and evolve as the passage of time works its way through their lives. What emerges is a fable of the American South in the highest tradition: soaring, tragic, and eternally striving for redemption.

”Denis Johnson seems to be the abiding spirit of the novel, which achieves the incendiary strangeness of his prose . . . Bible offers us a remarkable vision of adolescence as not just a time of extreme exposure but one of visionary longing.” — THE NEW YORK TIMES After an adolescent prank leads to a stranger’s death, Alvis Maloney rambles westward. He lands in a small North Carolina town and falls in love—in love with his neighbor Molly, with a lonesome quarterback called Miles, with a whole community of enduring misfits and losers. But at the same time, another life takes shape in Maloney’s dreamlike visions: a horse named Forever, a princess with hypochondria, and an electric city that’s always just out of reach. As these two promises of home fight for their hold on Maloney, the story careens toward disaster, and in the end Maloney must choose between love and redemption. From the author Electric Literature called “one of the most interesting and exciting new novelists in years,” Michael Bible’s Empire of Light blooms with mystical imagination and a hopeful heart.