Outposts

1. 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.
2. 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.