I'm Christopher Lighten and this is open source with the astonishing novelist Paul Harding.

Out of the blue a decade ago, Paul Harding won a huge popular following first and then

the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his modern main sort of folktale called Tinkers.

His new one is deeper, darker, more ambitious philosophically I think, more poetic, more

beautiful in long stretches or ironical, too, starting with the title, This Other Eden.

Takes on from sketchy reality, a historic colony of free poor people, Europeans, Africans,

Indigenous Panopskuts, fishermen, farmers, all of them on a tiny island off the coast

of Maine about a century ago until they got swept up by the state and banished to confinement.

Some of them in the main school for the people minded.

In the novel, it is Paul Harding's invented characters and his imagination that compose

a tale of family love, encompassing the damages of incest, and murder, and official state

cruelty.

Does that get a started, Paul?

Sounds like it's good to play.

It's a jump off.

You have the beautiful encapsulation of it.

The great event that starts it is a storm, a flood in 1815, an incredible hurricane,

but it's been a family ritual ever since to remember it, recount it.

Read that passage where Esther, the matriarch in 1915 or so, is putting herself head of

the story.

Right.

It's a local flood narrative and it's a tall tale that she takes great delight in telling

...