“Readers should prepare to have their perceptions blown…on a journey unlike anything else.”
— IndieReader
In the Roaring Twenties, Edward Cumming might have become a railroad businessman, but he was more interested in literature. During the Depression, he tried to write a book about historical castrations. At thirty-nine, he died by suicide.
What went wrong for him? A lack of focus? A problem of fate? The number forty? Or was his book haunted?
In this train ride of an American biography, Tucker Lieberman tells the story of the would-be scholar of eunuchs. It is an essay about war, racism, gender, time, mortality, free will, money, argument, information architecture, and why a writer might not finish a book.
A hypno-saga…experimental, tender, angry, freighted.
Curious?
You can hear the author:
* read an excerpt at The Next Best Book Blog (5 min, MP3)
* read a different excerpt as part of Performance Anxiety’s March 2020 reading (YouTube)
* perform for LockdownLit (1 min, Instagram video)
* converse with other authors on “Let’s Talk Books With Christina,” sponsored by New York Writers Workshop – May 20, 2020 (1 hour, Facebook video)
* speak on Without Books – September 22, 2020 (3 min, podcast)
* talk about the travel that was involved for research (2 min, LinkedIn video)
You can read:
* the entire introduction for free online! Find it on Medium, press Glose’s “Start reading now” button, or use Kindle’s “Look inside” feature.
* a review on a blog by a true fan
* an interview with the author on Indie Reader
Buy!
eBook: Kobo (Indigo, or directly in the Kobo store), Nook (Barnes and Noble), Kindle (Amazon), Apple Books, Glose, and ePub (Bertrand, Bol, Booktopia, Cloudreadingbooks, and Weltbild).
Paperback: Request it from your local independent bookstore! Ask for Ten Past Noon by Tucker Lieberman, ISBN 978-1-7329060-4-4, distributed by IngramSpark. It’s print-on-demand. Though the store won’t have copies in stock, you can order it and wait. Consider supporting:
- The Booksmith in San Francisco. They included Ten Past Noon in their LockdownLit online feature.
- Island Books in Rhode Island
- BookPeople in Austin, Texas
- Powell’s in Portland, Oregon
- Bookshop, which raises money for local bookstores
The paperback is also available through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-a-Million, and Waterstones.
Ask your library to carry it, too, please, and see what happens.
As of February 2022, IngramSpark estimates it can ship a paperback within 5 business days. Go ahead and place your order. The mail will come eventually, just as it did a hundred years ago. Please be patient—the train is on the move.
Ten Past Noon
Focus and Fate at Forty
Author: Tucker Lieberman
Publisher: Glyph Torrent, February 2020
480 pages
ISBN 978-1-7329060-4-4 Paperback
ISBN 978-1-7329060-5-1 eBook
About the Author
Haunted by his acquaintance with the late author of Eunuchry, Tucker Lieberman wrote the ghost story “Exit Interview” for DefCon One’s “imaginary friends” fiction anthology, I Didn’t Break the Lamp. His recent books include Painting Dragons: What Storytellers Need to Know About Writing Eunuch Villains and Bad Fire: A Memoir of Disruption.
At Brown University, he received the Casey Shearer Memorial Award for Creative Nonfiction and a bachelor’s degree in philosophy. He earned a postgraduate degree in journalism from Boston University.
Originally from Boston, Massachusetts, he lives with the science fiction writer Arturo Serrano in Bogotá, Colombia. He is turning forty.
After I published this book, I keep learning:
G. M. Cumming taught law with Burdick, Kirchway, and Moore
Did Ned Cumming know Lincoln Kirstein?
Do We Shine a Light Into the Dark Ages… (on Matthew Gabriele and David M. Perry’s The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe)
We Do Not Ever Escape From Myth (on Other Peoples’ Myths: The Cave of Echoes by Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty)
Discarding a Category That Does Not Serve (on Why Fish Don’t Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life by Lulu Miller)
Until Water Is No Longer Wet (on The Bathysphere Book by Brad Fox)
Is It About Time, Bodies, or Both? (on Trans Talmud: Androgynes and Eunuchs in Rabbinic Literature by Max K. Strassfeld)
Variations in Storytelling: ‘Meander, Spiral, Explode’ (on Meander, Spiral Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative by Jane Alison)
On encyclopedic urges (quotes)
The Industrial Revolution: All of It Has to Change Again (on A Brief History of How the Industrial Revolution Changed the World by Thomas Crump)
What is ‘Orientalism’? (on Orientalism by Edward Said)
The Burning of Smyrna in 1922 (on Smyrna, September 1922 by Lou Ureneck)
This Novel Imagines Fascism in the 1930s USA (on It Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis)
The 1930s American Nazi Movement in New York
Trans Kids Are Found in History, Too (on Histories of the Transgender Child by Jules Gill-Peterson)
A Surgeon for WWI and WWII Vets Also Helped a Trans Man (on The Facemaker by Lindsey Fitzharris)
The ‘Undecidability’ of Life: Freedom and Despair… (on Murmur, a novel by Will Eaves, based on the coercive castration of Alan. Turing)
A Book About a Particular Life Shift (on Iron John by Robert Bly)
On Choosing to Be Incompatible with the World (on When They Tell You To Be Good by Prince Shakur)
Passion, detachment, death-drive, ghosts, equilibrium, old-growth (quotes)
Tucker Lieberman 