by
Eric Larsen
Buy a Copy of The End of the 19th Century 
,
("I believe this book is a profound act of memory, a sort of American Proust")
Third in the Tetralogy,
An American Memory
Click cover to buy a copy..........1988—AN AMERICAN MEMORY, a novel. Winner of the first "Heartland Award," given annually since 1988 by the Chicago Tribune for the best novel about the middle west or by a midwestern author. "In An American Memory the past is the enemy. This haunting first novel is the scarred history of three generations of the Reiner family—descendents of
Norwegian pioneers—whose portraits are sketched against the vast spread of the Midwestern plains. Seen through the eyes of the third generation, An American Memory captures the
land’s pulsating rhythms and a boy’s isolation. The boy, Malcolm, lives in a sparsely furnished house on a half-abandoned farm near the town of West Tree, Minnesota. He is a quiet child who grows up listening." Read more about the book here. Read excerpts here.
Click cover to buy a copy
..........2006—I AM ZOË HANDKE, a novel. "At the end of Eric Larsen’s prizewinning first novel, An American Memory, the hero, Malcolm Reiner, married. And, as Malcolm, whose upbringing threatened to cripple him forever, reported, 'We have agreed to marry and leave the Midwest.' Now I Am Zoë Handke, Eric Larsen’s extraordinary portrait of the strange, grave, elegant girl Malcolm married, completes the story of a deeply dependent marriage." Read more about the book here. Read excerpts here.
Click cover to buy a copy...........2006—A NATION GONE BLIND: AMERICA IN AN AGE OF SIMPLIFICATION AND DECEIT. Meanwhile, this from the author: "I was born in 1941 (I have two memories from the
Second World War), struggled through adolescence in the 1950’s,
spent most of the 1960’s getting educated, and, from 1970 or so until
spring 2006 worked, in one form or another, as an English prof. That’s
my life, and A Nation Gone Blind is a book about the changes
that, during it, I’ve seen for myself—changes in American art,
literature, academics, high culture and low, mass media, and—far,
far from least—politics. The state of America’s cultural and
intellectual health—as can now be seen by anyone who either dares
or cares to look—seems to me disastrous, the state of the nation in
general one of desperate emergency. The fact is that America may, conceivably,
no longer even now be a free republic, and another fact is that it may,
just as conceivably, lack the inner strength ever to become one again. Yet
in spite of this situation, almost no one—and I mean nation-wide—is
writing or speaking openly, broadly, penetratingly, or persuasively about
it or them, and certainly they’re not reaching a wide enough or a
responsive enough audience. It’s as though speaking the truth about
America’s politico-cultural health has itself become taboo. Or, worse,
it’s as though Americans have become blind to the very fact, nature,
and extent of the real emergency they’re now living in the midst of." Read more about the book here. Read excerpts here. Read an interview with the the author—also by the author—for more discussion of the book and the emergencies it talks about. For all of this and more, click here.
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Click cover to buy a copy..........2008—THE END OF THE 19TH CENTURY, a novel. Click on the cover to buy a copy, and read here some statements from publishers and editors: "[This] is an important, if apocalyptic, work. . . There is, however, nothing homespun about this novel: its literary precursors would have be to Joyce, Becket, Proust. It is deeply modernist. . . This book is important, its writer gifted with genius. Please don't let it go." "I believe this book is a profound act of memory, a sort of American Proust. . . I was mesmerized in reading." The study of place and character that began in An American Memory continues with The End of the Nineteenth Century. Set again in West Tree, Minnesota, the events in the story sometimes take place earlier than those in the writer’s first novel, although at the same time the whole extends a considerable time beyond the ending-point of An American Memory. In this third in the tetralogy of novels, Malcolm Reiner sets out to create what could be thought of as his own intellectual autobiography, in the ancient tradition of self-explorations in the context of history from St. Augustine onward. Buy the book by clicking here. Read excerpts from the book by clicking here.
..........THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE AMERICAN NATION, a novel, is the final volume in the tetralogy, Late U.S.A. You can read more about the novel by clicking here for a page that will also lead you to a number of excerpts from the novel. Herewith, a description of the tetralogy: The Decline and Fall of the American Nation is the fourth in a historically-based tetralogy of novels called not U.S.A., as in the case of the famous John Dos Passos work, but Late U.S.A.. The first novel is An American Memory (1988), the second, I Am Zoë Handke, the third The End of the 19th Century, and the fourth The Decline and Fall. Together, the novels look, in an intensely personal, intellectually probing, analytic, yet also often highly poetic, symbolic, and surprising way, into the slow death of the once promise-filled republic, the U.S.A., based in its origin on the sanctity of the individual, but now overtaken, seized, stolen, raped and corrupted by emptiness, greed, gullibility, and by the most cruelly hollow of leaders who follow one after another in a steady replication more than anything else like the replication of devouring and life-stealing cells in the disease commonly known as cancer.