ABOUT THE BOOK

As a teenager, it was never Sam Pulsifer's intention to torch an American landmark. He certainly never planned to kill two people in the blaze. To this day, he still wonders why that young couple was upstairs in bed in the Emily Dickinson house after hours.

After serving ten years in prison for his crime, Sam is determined to put the past behind him. He finishes college, begins a career, falls in love, gets married, has two adorable kids, and buys a nice home. His low-profile life is chugging along quite nicely until the past comes crashing through his front door.

As the homes of Robert Frost, Edith Wharton, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and even a replica of Henry David Thoreau's cabin at Walden Pond go up in smoke, Sam becomes the number one suspect. Finding the real culprit is the only way to clear his name but sometimes there's a terrible price to pay for the truth.

An Arsonist's Guide to Writers Homes in New England is a literary tour de force, a brilliant skewering of every memoir ever written and a novel that will have readers underlining their favorite passages and reading them aloud

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Brock Clarke is the author of The Ordinary White Boy, What We Won't Do, and Carrying the Torch. He has twice been a finalist for a National Magazine Award in Fiction. His work has appeared in the Virginia Quarterly Review, OneStory, the Believer, the Georgia Review, and the Southern Review; in the Pushcart Prize and New Stories from the South anthologies; and on NPR's Selected Shorts. He teaches creative writing at the University of Cincinnati.