Daniel Melnick's Blog: June 2019

About the arts and ideas - on my novels and literature, music, and art

A new book about Beethoven gathers together (and completely rewrites and supplements) my blog posts on Beethoven into a short introduction to the composer, Ways of Hearing Beethoven, which I hope to see published. My novel The Fall of the Berlin Wall, completed a year ago, is about musicians and particularly the intense, irrepressible daughter of the legendary pianist featured in my previous novel Hungry Generations, now fifteen years after those events. Five years ago, my 2015 novel, The Ash Tree, was published by West of West Books in conjunction with the April 24, 2015 centenary of the Armenian genocide; it's about an Armenian-American family and the sweep of their history in the twentieth century - particularly from the points of view of two women in the family.

There are three other novels of mine, which I would love to see published. One is Pathological States, about a physician's family in L.A. in 1962. Another is Hungry Generations, about a young composer's friendship in L.A. with the family of a virtuoso pianist, published on demand by iUniverse, which I think would be of value to a conventional publisher. A Burnt Offering - a fable (a full rewriting and expansion of my earlier Acts of Terror and Contrition - a nuclear fable) is my political novella about Israel and its reactions to the possibility of a war with Iran (with the fear that it will be a nuclear war).
[My blog posts are, of course, copyrighted.]

Sunday, June 23, 2019

New book from Mark Arax - "The Dreamt Land - Chasing Water and Dust Across California

Knopf has published a brilliant book by Mark Arax, our nephew, titled "The Dreamt Land - Chasing Water and Dust Across California." As I wrote in a review, it's a passionate book with the epic sweep of a classic, at the level of other masterpieces about California like Joan Didion's workl I've followed Mark's work from the beginning, and - completely independent of his help with my book "The Ash Tree" about Armenian-Americans in the aftermath of the 1915 Genocide - I believe that he has grown tremendously from book to book:
"The Dreamt Land" is a wonderfully compelling book about water in the life of a state and above all about California itself - "the dreamt land." It has the passionate engagement and the great epic sweep of a classic. The personal stories, the vivid characters and encounters, and the interlinked portrayals of place and history unfold beautifully. And the book's voice combines a dark awareness of disaster, humiliations, and stark truths, with an affirming urgency that truly gives life to the work. The truth is the book is at the highest level, the sort of brilliant work that deserves a Pulitzer or National Book Award.
There's an Amazon link in the side column.

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