An Impenetrable Screen of Purest Sky

The Tree of Life meets In Search of Lost Time in this contemporary tale of loss and the power of story.

Daniel is pursued by stories. His father, in thrall to a myth, has disappeared; his mother and sister, too; and Lydia, his lover, leaves him and the novel he cannot finish for quantum mechanics, the place where theory tells tales about the real. And then there is Pearl, the girl beneath the floorboards, whose adventures hum alongside Daniel’s own. In this contemporary, contemplative fairy tale, the autobiographical novel takes on the cast of legend, and the uncertainty of memory leaves reality on shaky ground. Can parallel universes exist? Can a preoccupation with Moby Dick overwhelm the story unfolding before you? Where do you stand in relation to the metaphysics of your own life?

Publication date: September 3, 2013

Format: Trade Paper

Dimensions: 5.5 x 8.25

Page count: 256 pages

ISBN: 9781566893411

Dan Beachy-Quick is the author of five books of poetry, most recently Circle’s Apprentice; two books of prose, A Whaler’s Dictionary and Wonderful Investigations; as well as a number of chapbooks and two collaborations, Conversities (with Srikanth Reddy) and Work from Memory (with Matthew Goulish). He teaches in the MFA program at Colorado State University, and lives in Fort Collins, Colorado, with his wife and two daughters.

“Dan Beachy-Quick] writes with heightened lyricism, an ear for rhythm and rich sensory detail.” 

—The Chicago Tribune

"A rich, profound, fascinating book, the kind that widens the margins of everything we read, making room for new observations, more creative relationships all around: writer/reader, person/book, literature/life."

—The Los Angeles Times

“A marvelous novel, by turns lyrical, realistic, dreamlike, and philosophical but always intelligent and gorgeously written.”

—Kirkus, starred review

“Dizzying and beautiful. . . . Like Daniel, we hope for a glimpse, however fleeting it might be, of this disparate world as a cohesive whole—somethingness, a world with meaning.” 

—Los Angeles Review of Books

“With this contemporary fairy tale, Beachy-Quick has reimagined the autobiographical form to include the cast of archetypical legend.”

—Denver Examiner

“Beachy-Quick floods his novel with a rich confluence of ideas, some limpid, many opaque, but every one flowing. This is fiction that challenges and perplexes laced with poetry with the power to affect.” 

—The Rumpus

“Philosophy and poetry collide, colored in by fairy tales and the childhoods they possess—equal parts Edith Wharton and the brothers Grimm.” 

—PANK

“A book of psalms in which we watch the narrator improvise hymns of himself from the fleeting stuff of each passing moment.” 

—Paul Harding

“I am not sure if I read this novel or if it bloomed for me, like a night flower. I cherish the exquisite story and style of Dan Beachy-Quick’s fairy-tale fiction.”

—Kate Bernheimer