Pieces for Small Orchestra

Each segment in Pieces for Small Orchestra opens up a new character, a new faux-room
in the architect’s delight of this non-hotel, a hotel that desperately wants to exist. This is Lock’s
brilliant way of bending the standard rules of narrative while still remaining a
story-teller... ------> J. Tyler at Ploughshares

There are moments that remind me of Sax Rohmer or early 20th century science fiction,
bits and pieces of language that seem to come out of Jules Verne or Gaston LeRoux.
The language itself is quite stylized, replete with a carefully eccentric vocabulary
that Lock does very well. He has an impressive ability to create a unique and original world.
                                                           Brian Evenson

Praise for Shadowplay

[Lock’s] work seems to emanate … from an essential strangeness, an estrangement from
easily agreed-upon psychologies, from popular culture, from anything resembling a zeitgeist.
It is marked by an eerie tonality and an intense, unsettled intellectual curiosity—a Lock novel
might take place during any time period, anywhere in the world.
                                   Dawn Raffel, The Brooklyn Rail

Lock’s language reflects the fabulous nature of the myth, intricate in description … full of repeated images that
… resonate deeply within the story.
                                  The Quarterly Conversation

Shadowplay is another of the master locksmith’s nested boxes whose evocative,
ensorcelling prose will withstand multiple readings.
         John Madera, The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Lock offers fresh insight on that peculiar grief of losing someone who exists only as an idea,
only in story … The danger of stories, Lock implies, is that their very unreality can
compound rather than make sense of loss.
                                                 Rain Taxi

Praise for Norman Lock

Wise up and get all you can of Lock. His writing was written by a writer exquisite in the
singularity (read for this “genius”) of his utterance.
                                                Gordon Lish

[Lock’s] prose is melodial, and alert to every signal from the unseen.
                                                Gary Lutz

Lock channels … our gorgeous desolation, our longing for connection, both
earthly and divine.
                                               Dawn Raffel

All hail Lock, whose narrative soul sings fairy tales, whose language is glass.
                                              Kate Bernheimer

… gradually the shimmer of the words deepens into a more visceral sense of menace.
If Ionesco had written an American suspense thriller, it might be something like this.
                                             Los Angeles Times

Once again, Mr. Lock presents the impossible in a way that makes splendor common.
                                            Deron Bauman

Norman Lock

Norman Lock has written novels and short fiction as well as stage, radio and screen plays.
He received the 1979 Aga Kahn Prize, given by The Paris Review. He is a recipient of fellowships
from the New Jersey Council on the Arts and from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts—
both for fiction—and, in 2011, for poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts. His latest
prose works are the novels Shadowplay and The King of Sweden, published by Ellipsis Press
and Ravenna Press, respectively, and the short-fiction collection Grim Tales, released this year
in a new version by Mud Luscious Press. Shadowplay received the 2010 literary fiction prize,
given by The Dactyl Foundation. Norman lives in Aberdeen, New Jersey, with his wife, Helen.