We ask authors to share their favorite book they would gift to readers during this holiday season.
Mark Everglade recommends SHERMAN: A NOVEL by Joseph Hurtgen
Sherman is a science fiction book that imagines an alternate history in the making where Native Americans were empowered during the Civil War after coming across a time machine. It is one of the most unusual books I’ve read. It is historical fiction with good use of time-period slang, but it’s also science fiction and satire. In some ways it’s post-modern, from the tone to toying with narrative styles, and the destruction of the grand narrative of history, yet it’s still value-laden and doesn’t quite fit that pigeonhole. Despite reading like absurdism at times, it’s also not an absurdist book, in that each character is imbued with a true sense of meaning in their lives, whether it’s winning a war, justice, discovery, or unabashed hedonism. It’s the extremes to which they take their self-imposed meaning that makes them seem darkly satirical, in essence, caricatures of themselves. The book, like our history, defies categorization, and this itself is a unique and spectacular achievement.
See my full review here: https://www.markeverglade.com/
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