In 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 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."
"Steve Erickson is one of the two or three most exciting novelists in the world today, and Arc d'X is his most exciting novel."
Tom Robbins
"Flat-out amazing: an allegory about the nature of freedom, the varieties of slavery, and the 'collision of time and memory called history.' Erickson's tour de force unfolds with pitiless logic, gleaming prose, passionate sympathy. Grade: A."
Tom Robbins
"A brilliantly imaginative novelist of the utmost seriousness and grace. As Arc d'X amply demonstrates, all too few contemporary talents are so admirably equipped for the deep lateral exploration of our dire and marvelous era."
