The Little Book - Hardcover

Edwards, Selden

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0525950613 ISBN 13: 9780525950615

Publisher: Dutton Adult, 2008

Synopsis

The exiled scion of a prominent Boston banking family, forty-seven-year-old Wheeler Burden is living in 1988 San Francisco until he is mysteriously transported to fin de siècle Vienna, a city that he finds strangely familiar, where he finds a mentor in Sigmund Freud, falls in love with a young American woman, and gains insight into the war-hero father he never knew. A first novel. 100,000 first printing.

About this title

About the Author:

Selden Edwards began writing The Little Book as a young English teacher in 1974, and continued to layer and refine the manuscript until its completion in 2007. It is his first novel. He spent his career as headmaster at several independent schools across the country, and for over forty years has been secretary of his Princeton class, where he also played basketball.

Review:

“Selden Edwards’s impressive debut novel is richly inventive, woven tightly with incident, and fully engaging. It is also superbly humane and readable”
—Richard Ford

”Selden Edwards’s The Little Book is a wonderful novel and I think it has a chance to become a famous one. I’ve never read a novel like it. And I felt like my life was changing forever as I savored its many delights and mysteries.”
—Pat Conroy

The Little Book is named as one of “two first-time novelists I’m looking forward to becoming acquainted with,” in a list by Geraldine Brooks, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of March and the recent People of the Book in the Wall Street Journal Weekend

“A major BEA galley to grab... This novel ends up a sweet, wistful elegy to the fantastic promise and failed hopes of the 20th century.”
—Publishers Weekly

"A work that feels effortless... Part mystery, part meditation on the marriage of past and present, part love letter to a bygone era, the novel moves fluidly through time and place, belying its three- decade creation."
—Playboy Magazine

“Not every summer volume is a throwaway beach book, quickly skimmed and quickly forgotten. Herewith, promising, (mostly) substantive reads... Written over 30 years, Selden Edwards’s The Little Book (Dutton, August 14) dumps ’70s rock star Wheeler Burden in late 19th-century Vienna, where he tangles with Freud, Mahler, and growing anti-Semitism.”
—The Boston Phoenix

“If you like time travel, romance, and fin de siecle Vienna, this is your summer book. A San Francisco heir and philosopher suddenly finds himself in 1897 where he meets Sigmund Freud, Mark Twain, and his own father.”
—From Marjorie Kehe’s summer book roundup in the Christian Science Monitor

“An ideal late summer reading getaway.... The Little Book is all about plot—that’s what makes it both an entertaining mental escape and a tough book to do justice to in a review....The Little Book is...a soaring thing of joy whose only purpose — and I mean this as a compliment — is to delight and entertain.”
—Maureen Corrigan, NPR

“As you might expect, The Little Book is anything but little. This is a wide-ranging novel of grand ideas, of the promise of the new century, now so far behind us. It is a story of fathers and sons, to be sure, of the bygone days when an American aristocracy held the reins of power. And it is a tale of books within books, and their influence upon history. But Edwards has a wonderfully subversive way with all this; along with the great men of the era, he creates astonishing female characters. The Burden women, who marry into the family after living rich, full lives of their own, have their tales to tell, too. All this swirls around in a graceful waltz of a book, spinning at times at dizzying speed, but leaving behind a haunting, unforgettable melody.”
—New Orleans Times-Picayune

“The Little Book is presented with undeniable brio. Enthusiasts of Vienna and narratives of time travel are in for a thrilling adventure.”
—San Francisco Chronicle

“Take a pinch of Mitch Albom's For One More Day and The Five People You Meet in Heaven (for an impossible chance to make amends or peace), draw a little from Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time and H.G. Wells' The Time Machine (for the potential of a twist on the physical universe as we know it), on the upscale side borrow a bit from Michael Cunningham's The Hours (for clever paralleling of extremely different contexts), hark back to E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime (for commingling historical and fictional characters) and throw in a heady dollop of romantic mooning a la Robert James Waller's The Bridges of Madison County, and you will have an inkling of the ingredients pulped together in The Little Book.
—Chicago Tribune

“The Little Book is quite the twisty not-so-little novel. Everything is connected, we are told in The Little Book, and indeed it is in this tale. Caught up in an eternal loop, as well, though the book does come to a tender close, but only to start up again in the mind's eye. It's hard not to be thoroughly taken with such an approach to both the real and imagined past.”
—New York Daily News Sunday

“B+. Back to the Future for the intellectual set.”
—Entertainment Weekly

“One of “Ten Things We Love This Week”
—Entertainment Weekly’s ‘Must List’, August 15, 2008

“The Little Book shows the rich imagination and the intellectual fire of the first-time author... It would not be surprising to see this book become a classic.”
—Deseret News (Salt Lake City)

“Edwards has been working on `The Little Book' since 1974, and it shows. He's created a complete world, one that's a pleasure to enter.” —Bloomberg News

“The Little Book is unlike any novel I have read. In its historical scope it resembles Anthony Powell’s wonderful series A Dance to the Music of Time, but with the introduction of the fantastic, through the device of time travel, and myth, through the arts and psychology, it delivers a very different and rather more modern experience. With so many volumes published in such a wide variety of styles today, it’s hard to tell if any new book will survive for even a year, never mind gain literary immortality. But this novel, rooted in the work of more than 30 years, has as good a chance as any in recent memory of withstanding the test of time and becoming a classic.”
–Santa Barbara Independent

About this edition

• Publisher: Dutton Adult
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0525950613
• ISBN 13: 9780525950615
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 416