{"id":25822,"date":"2015-07-16T14:03:38","date_gmt":"2015-07-16T19:03:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/?p=25822"},"modified":"2015-07-16T14:19:33","modified_gmt":"2015-07-16T19:19:33","slug":"darkness-before-mourning-signing-at-off-square-books-sunday-719","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/darkness-before-mourning-signing-at-off-square-books-sunday-719\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cDarkness Before Mourning\u201d Signing at Off-Square Books Sunday 7\/19"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\" style=\"font-size: 14pt;\">J. Greg Perkins is a retired executive and Faulkner enthusiast. For forty years, he arose and began writing at 4 am, eventually creating the 19-volume <i>Darkness Before Mourning<\/i> series, one of the largest bodies of serious fiction ever created by a single author, rivaling Proust in scope. <i>The Announcers<\/i> is volume one of this series.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\" style=\"font-size: 14pt;\">J.G. Perkins\u2019 19-volume <i>Darkness Before Mourning<\/i> is one of the largest series of serious fiction ever created by a single author. Over 40 years in the making, the novels comprise over 10,000 pages in manuscript. Publishing the project has required an enormous editorial team to ensure that the complete series will be issued in only two years, starting with <i>Volume I, The Announcers<\/i>.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\" style=\"font-size: 14pt;\">Each independent work forms part of a biographical continuum, exploring in profoundly dark semi-fictionalized form the author\u2019s searing experiences. This, the first volume of the series, will be published in July 2015, with the rest of the works following over the following 24 months.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\" style=\"font-size: 14pt;\">Perkins\u2019 absolutist realism, unredeemed by faith, is best compared to Thomas Bernhard, Albert Camus, or Samuel Beckett. The series is a remarkable window into American society, life, family and personal relationships from the 1950s to the present.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p2\"><span class=\"s1\" style=\"font-size: 14pt;\">In <i>The Announcers<\/i>, a man relives one of the pivotal periods that shaped his life: the two seasons he spent in Little League with his father, the team\u2019s announcer, who was secretly dying of cancer.<a href=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/06\/TheLocalVoiceLigature-25web.jpg\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"25\" height=\"16\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-14544\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/06\/TheLocalVoiceLigature-25web.jpg?resize=25%2C16\" alt=\"The Local Voice Ligature\" \/><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p2\"><span class=\"s1\" style=\"font-size: 14pt;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/0719-JGPerkins.jpg\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" fetchpriority=\"high\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"640\" height=\"243\" class=\" size-full wp-image-25824 aligncenter\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/0719-JGPerkins.jpg?resize=640%2C243\" alt=\"0719-JGPerkins\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/0719-JGPerkins.jpg?w=650&amp;ssl=1 650w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/0719-JGPerkins.jpg?resize=300%2C114&amp;ssl=1 300w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px\" \/><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>J. Greg Perkins is a retired executive and Faulkner enthusiast. For forty years, he arose and began writing<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":238,"featured_media":25823,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4934,2239,19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25822","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-events","category-local-literary-events","category-local-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/DarknessFEAT.jpg?fit=620%2C349&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25822","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/238"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25822"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25822\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25823"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25822"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25822"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25822"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}