Night Soil

The Millions Most Anticipated Fall Books of 2018 Praise for Night Soil "You'd think it has been done before but it really hasn't—the perfectly crafted, haunting and heartbreaking, raw, funny, unblinking yet merciful art novel." —Marlon James, author of Man Booker Prize-winning A Brief History of Seven Killings "A remarkably layered and nuanced novel that explores many themes simultaneously—the relationship between a single mother and her son, the repercussions of slavery and racism in America, the abuse of our natural environment, the search for a paternal role model—all through the life of a singularly unique gay character . . . Peck has done it with nuance and authenticity." —Lambda Literary "A hilarious, thought-provoking, and lush novel about art’s entanglement with America’s original sin."  —The Millions  "A haunting and gorgeously written queer coming-of-age story." —The Waterloo Region Record  "A work of dizzying, profane, deeply comic imagination." —Bay Area Reporter   "[An] elegantly written sucker punch of a novel . . . Peck’s moving, precisely rendered prose binds the reader to Judas with a knot tied so tightly that the character and the novel are impossible to forget." —Publishers Weekly, Starred Review "A lush, provocative, and thought-provoking story of queer identity at the intersection of art, family history, capitalism, and the American racial order." —Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review “Dale Peck’s Night Soil, a portrait of the artist(s) as mother-and-son, is a feat of storytelling. Faulknerian in its mythmaking, Delany-esque in its candor, Peck’s novel chronicles the queer, complex family history and present education of (birth-)marked narrator and insider-outsider, Judas 'Jude' Stammers. Vivid, multilayered and carnal, this novel never fails to surprise.” —John Keene, author of Counternarratives "Night Soil is a novel about art, genius, capitalism, and the uncomfortable, full of the pleasures of the unbeautiful and the broken, from the only genius I know who could write it and live. An incisive, shrewd meditation on just what marks the limits of the human heart, and why." —Alexander Chee, author of The Queen of the Night "Dale Peck’s intriguing, challenging Night Soil blends parable and queer coming of age story. American history gets told as dynastic drama. It is a genealogical narrative that then drops open like a trap door into the history of consciousness. This is a compelling contemplation of the weird and human as well as a vigorous exploration of literary form." —Darryl Pinckney, author of Black Deutschland  “I’ve long thought nobody writes queer coming-of-age tales of love and longing like Dale Peck. We've been waiting a decade for another novel and Night Soil delivers on every level and more. This is a parable for a dead modern world that's built shakily atop an undying past, a mysterious family history where the personal and the political continually raise the stakes, and a lyrical modern mythology only a mind like Peck's can produce. Art, nature, race, gender, sexuality, all of it is reexamined in this fiction 2018 and onward cannot afford to skip. Riveting, mesmerizing, haunting—the novel is so lucky to have Dale Peck back.” —Porochista Khakpour, author of Sick: A Memoir “Dale Peck has written a brilliant, beautiful, provocative novel about art, society and human consciousness itself. In it he retraces many of the concerns that first