Join BookTowne and Author Daniel Turtel of Greetings from Asbury Park

171 Main Street,Manasquan NJ 08736

30 April, 2022

Description

Celebrate Independent Book Store Day with BookTowne and award-winning, debut author, Daniel Turtel, of Greetings From Asbury Park . Join us for this FREE author event at BookTowne in Manasquan, NJ! ABOUT THE BOOK Winner of the 2020 Faulkner Society Gold Medal for Best Novel, Daniel Turtel’s masterful debut, Greetings from Asbury Park (Blackstone Publishing; ISBN 978-1799956761; on sale April 5, 2022; $25.99) follows three half-siblings as they confront the death of their wealthy and domineering patriarch in a storied city on the Jersey Shore. Asbury Park is famous for its lively music scene and its beachfront boardwalk lined with bars and shops. Each summer the tide of tourists swells, bringing the city’s religious, racial and socioeconomic tensions to a boil; but when the cold returns and tourists recede, these contours - and their inherent tensions - are thrown into stark relief. In death as in life, Joseph Larkin haunts those who should have loved him best. His legacy, three children all from relationships with different women, is complicated by issues of legitimacy, race, and abuse. But they now have the chance to imagine new relationships and new futures, ones that would have been near-unthinkable while their father was alive. At the heart of the novel is the relationship between Casey and Gabrielle, half-siblings unknown to each other before Joseph’s death, and their older half-brother, David. In a final cruel act, Joseph wills a house he promised to his African American housekeeper (the mother of his secret daughter Gabrielle) to Casey, cutting the women out of his substantial estate. Joseph’s only son by marriage and his main beneficiary, David, is ambivalent to the substantial fortune that has come to possess, focusing instead on a determined quest to silence his demons with drugs and alcohol. Each raging against their fate and injustice, the characters’ struggles mirror those of Asbury Park. Wealthy white townships have constructed careful barriers to exclude the longstanding Black community, an arrangement that has periodically exploded in violence, most famously in 1970; the Syrian Jewish community has built a summer enclave for itself, but its sheer proximity to Asbury Park makes true isolation impossible, with devastating consequences for those who cross the thin boundary. And it is also a city where even longtime locals have been pushed to the fringe to make way for redevelopment and gentrification. Greetings from Asbury Park is a remarkable literary debut in the tradition of great American novels such as Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio. It is a deep interrogation of place that depicts flawed characters as they breakthrough to adulthood, truth, and to a moral relationship with the world. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Daniel Turtel grew up on the Jersey Shore. He graduated from Duke University in 2013 with a degree in mathematics and has been living in New York City since. In 2020 Greetings from Asbury Park was awarded the Faulkner Society’s Best Novel Award. In 2018, he won the Faulkner Society’s annual competition in both the novella and novel-in progress categories, for Among the Porcelain and Greetings from Asbury Park, respectively. His novels have also been short-listed in the Del Sol Press First Novel Competition and the James Jones Literary Society’s First Novel Fellowship, and his short fiction has been published in The Baltimore Review.