Coming August 15, 2024
A prize-winning fiction debut from the author of The King of Confidence
“This astonishingly beautiful book of interlocking stories has at its center things and people that are about to disappear. It is as if all these stories comprise one large story, an emotional journey of the lost and found. Miles Harvey’s book should be read from beginning to end—people and things, such as a barber pole, migrate from one story to another. A wonderful book.”
—CHARLES BAXTER, PEN/Malamud Winner and author of The Feast of Love
“By turns wry, heartbreaking, funny, and grief-haunted, these deceptively clear stories interlock to reveal wonderful depths, objects embodying the characters’ loves and losses diving below the waters only to resurface transformed. A beguiling read.”
—ANDREA BARRETT, National Book Award winner and author of Natural History
“Reading Miles Harvey’s The Registry of Forgotten Objects sated an appetite I hadn’t realized I had. Harvey’s fable-like stories conjure a world full of doors and subtle connections, a place both familiar and endlessly surprising. In our uncertain times, this book offers a powerful and necessary reminder that not only fear but also beauty resides in what is strange and unknown. This linked collection is masterful—one I’ll return to again and again.”
— V.V. GANESHANANTHAN, author of Brotherless Night
“Like a magician pulling a rabbit from a hat, Miles Harvey plucks mysterious coins from cobblestones, a sphere from the sea, a dusty postcard from a not-quite-empty house. In this beautiful collection, both lives and objects glow, with the light and weight of choices and longings that echo across stories, relationships, years.”
— CAITLIN HORROCKS, author of Life Among the Terranauts
“These stories consider the permanence that abides beneath the surface of all that leaves this world and the desire to believe that ‘everything is part of a pattern, everything rises.’ No truer words could be said about this collection. Miles Harvey is a masterful storyteller.”
— LEE MARTIN, Pulitzer Prize Finalist for The Bright Forever and 2023 judge of The Journal Non/Fiction Prize
About the Collection
In this haunting fiction debut, bestselling nonfiction author Miles Harvey probes the mysterious relationship between human longings and the secret lives of inanimate objects. In one story, an artist discovers an uncanny ability to transform modern sculptures into priceless ancient treasures. In another, a teenager experiences visions of other people’s pasts while vandalizing their abandoned houses. In a third, a grieving couple returns again and again to the beach where their son disappeared, pulling plastic bottles, fishing nets, buoys, and other bits of beach trash from the surf “as if those random bits of wreckage were the untranslated hieroglyphs of some secret language that might help them understand their loss.”
Harvey—whose work Dave Eggers called “ludicrously unputdownable”—delivers a constellation of stories that explore the gravitational pull of material things: how they drift into and out of our hands, how they assume new meanings, and the ways they serve as conduits between the present and past, the everyday and incomprehensible. Most of all, he explores how these objects have the power to reveal strange and moving facets of the human condition.
A longlist honoree for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction and for the Chautauqua Prize / A finalist for the Society of Midland Authors Award for Biography and Memoir / A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice / A Michigan Notable Book of 2020 / A Booklist and CrimeReads best book of 2021 / An Amazon Best Book of the Month in History & Biography / A Lit Hub “Most Anticipated Book of 2020” / A Publishers Weekly and Chicago Tribune best summer read.
“A masterpiece.” —Nathaniel Philbrick, National Book Award winner and New York Times bestselling author of In the Heart of the Sea and Mayflower.
“The King of Confidence is a ludicrously enjoyable, unputdownable read.” —Dave Eggers, Pulitzer Prize finalist and New York Times bestselling author of Zeitoun
“One of the best books of the year.” —Jonathan Eig, New York Times bestselling author of King: A Life
“[A] rollicking story, ripe for a Hollywood treatment.”
—Vanity Fair
“This evocative tale will astonish and delight fans of American history.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Perfect for fans of Devil in the White City.” —Kirkus Reviews
Order The King of Confidence now
About The King of Confidence
The riveting story of the most infamous American con man you’ve never heard of: James Strang, self-proclaimed divine king of earth, heaven, and an island in Lake Michigan, until his assassination in 1856.
In the summer of 1843, James Strang, a charismatic young lawyer and avowed atheist, vanished from a rural town in New York. Months later he reappeared on the Midwestern frontier and converted to a burgeoning religious movement known as Mormonism. Following the murder of church founder Joseph Smith, Strang unveiled a letter purportedly from the prophet naming him successor. He then persuaded hundreds of fellow converts to follow him to Beaver Island in northernmost Lake Michigan, where he declared himself a divine king.
From this stronghold he controlled a fourth of the state of Michigan, establishing a pirate colony where he practiced plural marriage and perpetrated thefts, corruption, and frauds of all kinds. Eventually, having run afoul of powerful enemies, including the U.S. president, Strang was assassinated, an event that was frontpage news across the country.
The King of Confidence tells this fascinating but largely forgotten story. Centering his narrative on this charlatan’s turbulent twelve years in power, author Miles Harvey gets to the root of a timeless American original: the Confidence Man. Full of adventure, bad behavior, and insight into a crucial period of antebellum history, The King of Confidence brings us a compulsively readable account of one of the country’s boldest con men and the boisterous era that allowed him to thrive.
About Miles Harvey
Miles Harvey won the 2023 Journal Non/Fiction Prize for The Registry of Forgotten Objects, a collection of short stories. He is the author of three books of nonfiction, The King of Confidence, Painter in a Savage Land and The Island of Lost Maps, a national and international bestseller. He teaches creative writing at DePaul University in Chicago, where he chairs the Department of English and is a founding editor of Big Shoulders Books, a nonprofit, social-justice publisher.
(Photo by Anne Ryan)
Works
Books Written and Edited by Miles Harvey
The Island of Lost Maps
This national and international bestseller tells the story of a curious crime spree: the theft of scores of valuable centuries-old maps from some of the most prominent research libraries in the United States and Canada. The perpetrator was Gilbert Joseph Bland, Jr., an enigmatic antiques dealer from South Florida, whose cross-country slash-and-dash operation had gone virtually undetected until he was caught in 1995–and was unmasked as the most prolific American map thief in history. As Miles Harvey unravels the mystery of Bland’s life, he maps out the world of cartography and cartographic crime, weaving together a fascinating story of exploration, craftsmanship, villainy, and the lure of the unknown.
“A fascinating intellectual adventure story…an astonishingly imaginative book.”—USA Today
“An intriguing literary adventure story, written with flair, imagination, and precision. By recreating the journey of a strange and remarkable map thief, author Miles Harvey takes readers on a compelling exploration of the weird world of maps.”—Susan Orlean, author of The Orchid Thief
“Beguiling…as with the best of maps, the more one looks, the more fascinating and intriguing it all becomes.”—Simon Winchester, author of The Professor and the Madman
Painter in a Savage Land
This is the thrilling story of Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues, the first European artist to journey to what is now the continental United States with the express purpose of recording its wonders in pencil and paint. Le Moyne’s images, which survive today in a series of spectacular engravings, provide a rare glimpse of Native American life at the pivotal time of first contact with the Europeans–most of whom arrived with the preconceived notion that the New World was an almost mythical place in which anything was possible.
“A fascinating exploration of the obscure life and violent times of Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues. … Harvey’s volume hits the sweet spot for both adventure buffs and history fans.” –Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“One astonishing discovery after another … Harvey’s groundbreaking, fun-to-read biography blows dust off significant swathes of history and makes for a rousing read.” –Booklist (starred review)
“[A] rip-roaring account of Le Moyne’s adventures. … It’s a testament to Harvey’s research and style that he can powerfully evoke a man about whom so few documentary traces remain.” –Entertainment Weekly
Big Shoulders Books
Miles Harvey is a founding editor of Big Shoulders Books, a publishing venture that aims to produce and disseminate, free of charge, high-quality books by and about Chicagoans whose voices might not otherwise be shared.
He has served as editor for two Big Shoulders Books projects, including The Garcia Boy: A Memoir, the autobiography of a brilliant young writer, Rafael Torch, whose life was cut short by a rare form of cancer at age 36. The son of an undocumented Mexican immigrant, Torch struggled with addiction before becoming a teacher at a high school in a largely Latino community on Chicago’s Lower West Side. His unflinching memoir focuses on the murder of a star student at that school—a symbol of the overwhelming challenges sons and daughters of immigrants face as they attempt to find a place in the larger society. What does it mean to be an American? And how does a person gain (or fail to gain) that identity? Although Rafael Torch wrote The Garcia Boy 15 years ago, the questions he poses are more important than ever.
Miles Harvey also was editor of How Long Will I Cry?: Voices of Youth Violence. In 2011 and 2012, while more than 900 people were being murdered on the streets of Chicago, he and his creative-writing students from DePaul University fanned out all over the city to interview people whose lives have been changed by the bloodshed. The result is an extraordinary and eye-opening work of oral history. With more than 50,000 copies in print, How Long Will I Cry? is at turns harrowing, heartbreaking and full of hope.