Elective Affinity is delighted to announce its first fiction release, a limited edition of The Pearls, by Will Heinrich. A raucous 1920s love triangle that ranges across the continent from New York City to Sheridan, Wyoming, and back again, The Pearls deals with painting, cigarettes, love, Jewish-American identity, and the relationship of language to consciousness. Heinrich is an art critic for the New York Times, and his first novel, The King’s Evil, was published by Scribner in 2003 and won a PEN/Robert Bingham fellowship the following year.

An excerpt from The Pearls:

“Imagine me, then, in the first-class dining car of a southbound train out of Saratoga Springs, sitting in front of an untouched cup of coffee with an unlit Tristán e Isolda cigar in my hand and my back to the flickering majesty of the Hudson River. A waiter appears with matches and a little steel guillotine but I shake my head. My coffee cup taps against its saucer, registering every tremor of the train car as finely as a phonograph needle; the violet-tinted, late-afternoon light marks out my silhouette on the table in front of me; the silhouette slowly turns from right to left, while the bright corona around it flashes rapidly, momentarily annihilated by every boulder, tree, or telephone pole passing between it and the sun; and the coffee itself is constantly finding level. But in the face of all this evidence of the world’s relentless particularity, I struggle to reject my senses. I spend a sleepless night alone, Marion having elected to remain upstate; rise at dawn; and walk all the way down to Wall Street from Central Park West, with the buildings harrowing out the early morning light against the same Tristán e Isolda as it burns down unsmoked between my middle and index fingers.”