"A rich, enthralling read. The characters and the world stayed with me long after I closed the covers."--Dennis Lehane
"The Beckoning World does beckon, unfolding lives and enfolding readers with love stories, all the heartbreaks we cannot outrun, the lucky and unlucky life of a family and a world past. Bauer sees with telescope and microscope, inner and outer world shared with loving clarity and an open brilliant elegance."--Amy Bloom, author, In Love
The Beckoning World gathers a cast that includes the 1918 Spanish flu, taking vivid spectral form; and baseball’s legends, Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig. And at its center, Earl Dunham and Emily Marchand and their simply relentless love. “What a thing,” Earl often thinks. “The way it just keeps coming for him.”
The Beckoning World is set in the first quarter of the twentieth century and follows Earl Dunham. His weeks are comprised of six days mining coal, followed by Sundays playing baseball. Then one day a major-league scout happens on a game, signs Earl, and he begins a life he had no idea he could even dream.
But dreams sometimes suffer from a lovely abundance, and in Earl's case her name is Emily Marchand. They fall quickly and deeply in love, but with that love comes heartbreaking complications.
The Beckoning World gathers a cast of characters that include Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig; a huge-hearted Pullman steward offering aphoristic wisdom; and countless others, not least of which is the 1918 Spanish flu taking vivid spectral form. At the center is a relentless love that Earl and Emily are defenseless against, allied as they are "in this business of their hearts."
Douglas Bauer is the author of three previous novels — Dexterity; The Very Air and The Book of Famous Iowans — and three works of non-fiction — Prairie City Iowa: Three Seasons at Home; The Stuff of Fiction: Advice on Craft, and What Happens Next?: Matters of Life and Death, which won the PEN/New England Award in Non-Fiction. He is also the editor of the anthologies, Prime Times: Writers on Their Favorite TV Shows and Death by Pad Thai and Other Unforgettable Meals. His numerous essays, reviews, and articles have appeared in Esquire, Harper’s, The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, The Los Angeles Book Review, and many other publications. He has won grants from the National Endowment for the Arts in both fiction and creative non-fiction. He lives in Cambridge, MA and teaches at Bennington College, where he is a core faculty member of the Bennington Writing Seminars MFA program in writing and literature.
The Beckoning World is set in the first quarter of the twentieth century and follows Earl Dunham. His weeks are comprised of six days mining coal, followed by Sundays playing baseball.
