Title: Orchard Park and Other Works
Description: Russell Huggins has died an indigent’s death but left behind a formidable literary estate. Tom Shaw has been enlisted by The University of Maryland’s Urban Archaeology Department to decipher and distill, catalogue and compile, Huggins’ vast collection of single-spaced, handwritten journals and ledgers littering the second floor of Button House, a dilapidated mansion on the outskirts of Orchard Park, a Baltimore suburb. Is it but a case of riotous hypergraphia or does the University’s adamancy suggest something else? *Orchard Park* tells the tale of one man’s effort to scratch at the canvas; to peel away life’s protective layers; to decrypt meaning from the cultural artifacts by which he is surrounded—to achieve grace through creation and redemption through imagination.
Subjects: Magic Realism, Trobar clus, roman à clef, Transcendental Fascism, Meta-Narrative, Literary Fiction, Cryptography, Narrative Cryptography, Information Management, Literary Criticism, Experimental Novel, Narrative Poetry, Film Theory, Elitism, Aristocracy
Places: Baltimore, Washington, Ocean City, New York City, Srebrenica, Geneva
People: Allayne Ashby, George Irwin, David Duff, Russell Huggins, Esteban Suarez, Val Tyner, Jagger Nomzamo, Aubrey Whistler
Time periods: 1998-2003