Trio

Norman Lock's "Trio" combines his acclaimed Joseph Cornell's Operas and Emigres with Grim Tales, his riff on the Brothers Grimm. These masterful works of the imagination demonstrate Lock's innate ability to transform the fanciful into the tactile. He makes new things in exquisite words. A sample from Emigres: "A very old emigre, who was each day growing more forgetful, woke up in the dead of night, put on his best suit and tie, shined his shoes, put on his best hat (a rakish borsalino), and went to find the dancehall where fifty years before, in the distant country of his youth he had danced the tango, magnificently, with a girl whose silk dress he could still feel against his palms." From Joseph Cornells' Operas: "died young and Mad Ludwig drowned himself in the Starnberger and Lola Montes became a circus exhibit, but ah! the impresario answered, they flew, you know, until the end they all of them defied gravity such was the strength of their desirewho, we wondered, who then is Hubble peering at through his telescope, Lola Montes having long ago died? from his opera box Joseph Cornell said: her remnant of light still desiring."

Norman Lock's fiction appears in respected journals throughout the U.S. as well as in Europe, Australia, and Canada (never forgetting that fine Argentine site — The Southern Cross Review). The work here is from A History of the Imagination, published in Europe as an e-book. Two extended prose sequences — Emigres and Joseph Cornell's Operas — are available in one book from elimae. Lock's dramatic works have been seen on stages throughout America and Germany. The House of Correction, published in the U.S. by Broadway Play Publishing, was one of the 10 best plays of 1988 and (for its revival) 1994, according to the LA Times. It was also "best new play" of the 1996 Edinburgh Theatre Festival. Lock is also the author of a film produced by the American Film Institute and shown at international film festivals. He was awarded the Aga Kahn Prize in 1979, given by The Paris Review.