Fortune Island

by E.M. Schorb

Fortune Island spans the last year in the life of Jessie Judas, a famed marine biologist and author, who has suffered most of her life from a haunting sense of something dreadful in her past. As a young girl growing up practically orphaned, with little or no education, on a nearly deserted Outer Banks island, Jessie has the good luck to meet a visiting writer, a folklorist. The writer becomes Jessie's protector, mentor and, eventually, mother. Unknown to Jessie, her father, who has been serving time in prison since she was an infant, returns to the island, incognito. His only desire is to observe his daughter and make sure that she's safe. He has no intention of interfering in her life, if he's satisfied. He finds twelve-year-old Jessie living with her step-father, an eccentric travelling evangelist, who might well be psychopathic; but since Jessie is also under the protection of her friend, the folklorist, he hesitates to reveal himself and intrude in her life. His hesitation to do so inadvertently triggers the event which creates in her the sense of tragedy that ever after shadows her otherwise successful life. Fortune Island is a story of passionate love, adventures on land and sea, an isolated, nearly-forgotten Carolina island, great wealth, great poverty, nobility, and, possibly, murder.

276 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2009

About the author

E. M. Schorb attended New York University, where he fell in with a group of actors and became a professional actor. During this time, he attended several top-ranking drama schools, which led to industrial films and eventually into sales and business. He has remained in business on and off ever since, but started writing poetry when he was a teenager and has never stopped. His collection, Time and Fevers, was a 2007 recipient of an Eric Hoffer Award for Excellence in Independent Publishing and also won the “Writer’s Digest” Award for Self-Published Books in Poetry. An earlier collection, Murderer's Day, was awarded the Verna Emery Poetry Prize and published by Purdue University Press. Other collections include Reflections in a Doubtful I, The Ideologues, The Journey, Manhattan Spleen: Prose Poems, 50 Poems, and The Poor Boy and Other Poems.

Schorb's work has appeared widely in such journals as The Yale Review, The Southern Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Chicago Review, The Sewanee Review, The American Scholar, and The Hudson Review.

At the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2000, his novel, Paradise Square, was the winner of the Grand Prize for fiction from the International eBook Award Foundation, and later, A Portable Chaos won the Eric Hoffer Award for Fiction in 2004.

Schorb has received fellowships from the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center and the North Carolina Arts Council; grants from the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation, the Carnegie Fund, Robert Rauschenberg & Change, Inc. (for drawings), and The Dramatists Guild, among others. He is a member of the Academy of American Poets, and the Poetry Society of America.

Reviews

[Pat · Rating 5 out of 5]

"A masterpiece in scope, characterization and drama, Fortune Island captures the imagination and excites the mind. Masterful!"


In E.M.Schorb's skilled hands, Fortune Island becomes a laboratory where he explores the depths and the heights of the human condition. At one level, it's a story of man's struggle to make a living and brave the elements on this isolated island. At a deeper level, it's a tale of childhood abuse, the exploitation of women, and the failure of men.

In Fortune Island, Schorb takes us into the dark soul of the Carolinas, from the mountains to the sea to the Outer Bank. It's an isolated place, home to only a few. But his story lifts the people of Fortune Island out of their isolation and shows their roots in a larger diaspora; the background of all Americans, even those who live in the most remote places.

We meet Jessie Judas, a marine biologist and author, basking in international fame, as she faces an early death from a terminal illness. We also meet her as a young girl, daughter of a mountain girl turned hooker and a seafaring hillbilly turned jailbird. Jessie commands center stage in this saga. It's her story. It's a tale of her achievement, an achievement of the mind despite her lack of an early education. E. M. Schorb, a fine poet, weaves Jessie's past and present into a seamless saga. The power of unselfish love is demonstrated through Jessie's father, whom she does not know. In Ruth, a writer who adopts Jessie, E.M.Schorb has created a person of character, a lady who chooses the value of life's work over the value of great wealth, and who lives life with passion.

A masterpiece in scope, characterization and drama, Fortune Island captures the imagination and excites the mind. This work places Schorb firmly at the table of his highly lauded contemporaries.

A masterful achievement!

[Joy]

Isolated on an island in the Outer Banks, Jessie knows few people and has never been to school. Her childhood is dogged by the horrible Reverend Cogburn, a fake preacher and many other worse things -- one of those worse things being Jessie's stepfather. FORTUNE ISLAND tells the story of her meeting with Ruth, who has come to the island to concentrate on her writing, and of Jessie's too-fast introduction to civilization. http://www.reviewers-choice.com/fortu...