Seventh Star Press is proud to announce Michael Williams as the newest member of our author family with his visionary literary project, the mythical realism City Quartet novels!
The City Quartet represents an ambitious and unique literary project from the highly-acclaimed author of early novels in the best-selling DRAGONLANCE series such as Weasel’s Luck and Galen Beknighted. The project will see revised editions of the novels Trajan’s Arch and Vine: An Urban Legend, and the releases of the third and fourth books in the City Quartet, Dominic’s Ghosts and Tattered Men.
Release dates for the revised editions of Trajan’s Arch and Vine: An Urban Legend will be announced very soon, along with the release date for Dominic’s Ghosts. Tattered Men will have a 2018 release date. The City Quartet novels will be released in both print and eBook formats.
“It is a great honor to be able to work with Michael to bring this project to readers everywhere,” Stephen Zimmer of Seventh Star Press commented. “The City Quartet weaves together exceptional literary quality and masterful storytelling, and these books represent a great contribution to the literary world, as well as being engaging, entertaining reads. A project like this does not come along often for a press and we are thrilled to be a part of bringing Michael’s vision to life.”
About the City Quartet: Four books (to be read in any order) centering on a mid-Southern city in which familiar human stories—coming of age, romantic triangles, political conspiracies, and crime investigations—take mythic form, and characters, anchored in the everyday, glimpse larger, inevitable patterns in the world around them.
The first book of the City Quartet is Trajan’s Arch, where a young man’s coming of age is haunted by his past, both figuratively and literally. The second book is Vine: An Urban Legend, in which an amateur performance of Euripides’ The Bacchae is disrupted by the god himself. The two novels may already be familiar to Williams’ readers, but they are the first members of the quartet, revised and re-visioned to fit a new, mythically charged world.
They will be joined by two other volumes: Dominic’s Ghosts, in which a silent film festival sparks an invasion of the city by figures from Central Europe’s nightmarish past, and Tattered Men, in which a burnt-out middle-aged writer, investigating the apparent murder of a homeless man, finds that the victim has traveled through worlds unimaginably large and ancient.
Each of these books can stand alone, but readers will discover that plots, characters, and patterns spill from one book to another, until the City Quartet forms a coherent, mythical world that celebrates our own mysteries and interconnections.
More about Michael: Over the past 25 years, Michael Williams has written a number of strange novels, from the early Weasel’s Luck and Galen Beknighted in the best-selling DRAGONLANCE series to the more recent lyrical and experimental Arcady, singled out for praise by Locus and Asimov’s magazines. His most recent books are Trajan’s Arch and Vine, an Urban Legend—novels he characterizes as “mythical realism”: in Trajan’s Arch, stories fold into stories and a boy grows up with ghostly mentors, and Vine mingles Greek tragedy and urban legend, as a local dramatic production in a small city goes humorously, then horrifically, awry.
Williams was born in Louisville, Kentucky, and spent much of his childhood in the south central part of the state, the red-dirt gothic home of Appalachian foothills and legends of Confederate guerrillas. Through good luck and a roundabout journey he made his way through New England, New York, Wisconsin, Britain and Ireland, and has ended up less than thirty miles from where he began. He has a Ph.D. in Humanities, and teaches at the University of Louisville, where he focuses on the the Modern Fantastic in fiction and film. He is married, and has two grown sons.
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About the Editor: MICHAEL KNOST is an author, editor, and columnist of science fiction, fantasy, horror, and supernatural thrillers. His Writers Workshop of Horror won the 2009 Bram Stoker Award® for superior achievement in nonfiction in Brighton, U.K. His critically acclaimed Writers Workshop of Science Fiction & Fantasy came out in 2013. His debut novel, Return of the Mothman was a finalist for the Bram Stoker Award® for superior achievement in first novel. The Horror Writers Association recently honored Michael with the prestigious Silver Hammer Award for his work as their mentorship program chair. He resides in Chapmanville, West Virginia with his wife, daughter, and a zombie goldfish. To find out more, visit www.MichaelKnost.com.