Miles Harvey
Miles Harvey's new book is The King of Confidence: A Tale of Utopian Dreamers, Frontier Schemers, True Believers, False Prophets, and the Murder of an American Monarch, which National Book Award-winner Nathaniel Philbrick calls a "masterpiece" and Pulitzer Prize finalist Dave Eggers describes as a "ludicrously enjoyable, unputdownable read." It will be published by Little, Brown & Co. in July 2020.
Harvey's previous work includes The Island of Lost Maps: A True Story of Cartographic Crime, a bestseller USA Today named one of the ten best books of 2000, and Painter in a Savage Land: The Strange Saga of the First European Artist in North America, awarded an Editors’ Choice honor from Booklist, and a best-books citation from The Chicago Tribune. A former Knight-Wallace journalism fellow at the University of Michigan, Harvey teaches creative writing at DePaul University, where he is a founding editor of Big Shoulders Books.
“What a vapid job title our culture gives to those honorable laborers the ancient Egyptians and Sumerians variously called Learned Men of the Magic Library, Scribes of the Double House of Life, Mistresses of the House of Books, or Ordainers of the Universe. 'Librarian' - that mouth-contorting, graceless grind of a word, that dry gulch in the dictionary between 'libido' and 'licentious' - it practically begs you to envision a stoop-shouldered loser, socks mismatched, eyes locked in a permanent squint from reading too much microfiche. If it were up to me, I would abolish the word entirely and turn back to the lexicological wisdom of the ancients, who saw librarians not as feeble sorters and shelvers but as heroic guardians. In Assyrian, Babylonian, and Egyptian cultures alike, those who toiled at the shelves were often bestowed with a proud, even soldierly, title: Keeper of the Books. - p.113”
“He was blessed with the sort of intense curiosity that most of us experience so infrequently it often seems to come as a surprise. I’m not talking about the kind of curiosity that INVITES but about the kind that DEMANDS, not about the kind that says I WONDER but the kind that says I MUST KNOW. The kind that makes you immerse yourself in a subject, ponder it over and over until you are able to make sense of it for others and, in so doing, give your own life new meaning in some small way. Under such a spell, humans can accomplish the extraordinary.”