Book Bundle: Bearings & Distances and Boundaries of Eden, by Glenn Arbery
Bearings and Distances and Boundaries of Eden
The first two books of a trilogy that concludes
with Gates of Heaven (forthcoming November, 2025).
Bearings and Distances by Glenn Arbery, is a novel of comic ironies and tragic recurrences set in the “post-racial” moment of the American experiment.
In the summer after Barack Obama’s election, Hermia Watson, a scholar of black history, lures the famous (and famously irresponsible) Professor Braxton Forrest back to his hometown in Georgia, using his two daughters as unwitting hostages. Returning alone while his pious wife continues touring Italy, Forrest arrives to the tremblings of his abandoned past and a confrontation with the Furies he thought modernity had left behind. In the course of a few days, Hermia realizes what violent revelations she has begun to unleash about her former lover, her mother, and her own identity—but it is too late to stop what is coming to light.
Arbery revisits the obsessions of the 20th century Southern renaissance in a work that satirizes misconceptions and shallow pieties but takes seriously the wisdom of the Southern literary tradition—and its classical antecedents.
Boundaries of Eden
When a boy who does not know his own name turns up near an abandoned country home, inquiries about his origins begin to uncover a past hidden not just by time, but by overgrowths of disguise and deception. An official investigation exposes an invasive international drug cartel tied to small-town crime, while the local journalist at the center of the revelations, Walter Peach, also faces his own history of early abandonment, conflicting ideologies, personal sin, and dark retribution. Set in the modern South but reaching back through the radical 1960s to the Civil War era, Boundaries of Eden has a strong contemporary relevance with deep classical and biblical resonance.
PRAISE
Glenn Arbery's Boundaries of Eden is many things: a book of generations; an intertextual tour de force; an anatomy of desire (sacred and profane); a corridor of horrors; a promise of hope. It offers an unflinching assessment of the postmodern present and frank acknowledgement of our shared, often malignant past. This is a fully-realized contemporary novel situated in the Grand Tradition, notable for its author's ability to move action and character forward through fast-paced dialogue and an unusual gift for conjuring time and place through vividly realized, cinematic detail. Readers of its prequel, Bearings and Distances, will bring a special gloss to this new novel, but Boundaries of Eden stands superbly on its own, striking in its pressing topicality but informed throughout by a firm grasp of first and last things.
—William Bedford Clark, author of The American Vision of Robert Penn Warren
