Outposts

by Sean Akerman

This literary novel is an existential mystery about a young academic commissioned to author the biography of a famous, reclusive writer named Nestor Dunn. His assignment takes him beyond the academy into a netherworld of treachery, madness, and art. Outposts is told from the aftermath of the failed biography. Barely surviving on unemployment, clutching a graduate degree that seems useless, the narrator had hoped that the Nestor Dunn project would be his big break. However, in the course of his tracking, a series of misadventures unfold. His search for the shape of Nestor Dunn's life spans academic conferences, strip clubs, cemeteries, the city of New York, and the mountains of western Maine. All the while, he becomes infatuated with Nestor's estranged, mysterious daughter, Emma. As the project progresses, the gulf between the narrator's realities and fictions grows wide. Creditors pursue him, money runs out, and his body approaches a nervous collapse. Finally, he retreats north, to his own place of birth, to investigate his subject more closely. And it is there, as his subject's life disintegrates around him, that the narrator finally finds his own way forward.

236 pages, Paperback

Published May 14, 2017

About the author

Sean Akerman is poet, novelist, and writer of non-fiction. Born in the lakes region of central Maine, he moved to New York City in 2006, where he earned a PhD in psychology from the City University of New York. He held faculty appointments at Hunter College, Sarah Lawrence College, and Bennington College. His books include: the novel, Outposts (Threekookaburras); the novella, Krakow (Harvard Square Editions); the poetry collection, The Magnitudes (Main Street Rag Publications); and a study of exile, Words and Wounds (forthcoming from Oxford University Press). He lives in the North Woods near Lake Superior's south shore. Currently, he is seeking representation for a novel manuscript about ten years in the life of a con-man.

contact: akerman.sean@gmail.com

Reviews

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

I finished it quickly as the plot engrossed me more than I’d anticipated. Generally I was compelled by the way several characters mirrored each other, at times blurring the lines with similarities of circumstance and at others contrasting each other decisively. The texture and imagery of the sentences was satisfying. At least one moment made my jaw drop. It’s not something I could have set aside. Past a certain point, I needed to know how it would end.