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Marianne Wiggins is the author of seven novels, including John Dollar, Almost Heaven, and Eveless Eden, which was nominate for the Orange Prize. She has won a Whiting Award, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, and the Janet Heidinger Kafka prize. She lives in Southern California.
Photo © Lara Porzak
Evidence of Things Unseen
Fos has returned to Tennessee from the trenches of France. Intrigued with electricity, bioluminescence, and especially x-rays, he believes in science and the future of technology. On a trip to the Outer Banks to study the Perseid meteor shower, he falls in love with Opal, whose father is a glassblower who can spin color out of light. Fos brings his new wife back to Knoxville where he runs a photography studio with his former Army buddy Flash. A witty rogue and a staunch disbeliever in Prohibition, Flash brings tragedy to the couple when his appetite for pleasure runs up against both the law and the Ku Klux Klan. Fos and Opal are forced to move to Opal's mother's farm on the Clinch River, and soon they have a son, Lightfoot. But when the New Deal claims their farm for the TVA, Fos seeks work at the Oak Ridge Laboratory -- Site X in the government's race to build the bomb. And it is there, when Opal falls ill with radiation poisoning, that Fos's great faith in science deserts him. Their lives have traveled with touching inevitability from their innocence and fascination with "things that glow" to the new world of manmade suns.
Marianne Wiggins 's Summer Reading List
Regarding the Pain of Others
by Susan Sontag
This is Sontag's expansion of "On Photography".
A Century of Dishonor
by Helen Hunt Jackson
The first, and classic, expose of US treatment of American Indians.
River of Shadoes
by Rebecca Solnit
A fascinating biography of Eadweard Muybridge, who plays a minor role in my new novel.
The Particulars of Rapture
by Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg
A masterpiece of existential theology.
Poets Against the War
Edited by Sam Hamill
The book of poems that's currently on the top of my poetry stack.
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Summer Reading Lists
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