Professor Eric Wilson makes his fiction debut with Polaris Ghost

Professor Eric G. Wilson, Thomas E. Pritchard Professor of English and director of the Creative Writing program, released his first work of fiction, Polaris Ghost, on March 1. The book’s launch party will take place at 3 p.m. on Sunday, March 18th, at Bookmarks in downtown Winston-Salem (634 W. 4th St.). 

Inspired by the work of David Lynch and William Blake, Polaris Ghost presents a fractured Bildungsroman interrupted by meditations on marriage, addiction, depression, and parenting. In scenes reminiscent of Blue Velvet and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Eric G. Wilson explores what goes on deep in the psyche through scenes of unnerving breakages and private rupture. Polaris Ghost is Wilson’s fiction debut, a fascinating hybrid rising from a mix of memoir, journalism, scholarship, and cultural analysis.

Advance praise for Polaris Ghost:

“Eric G. Wilson’s Polaris Ghost is both disturbing and familiar, lucid in its individual parts and mysterious in the convergences of those parts. Told with the intellectual scope and curiosity of Guy Davenport but as seen from between the blades of grass of Blue Velvet (or behind the dumpster at Winkie’s), it is this wonderful, porous thing, equal parts adventurous fiction and eccentric essay, a beautifully novel novel.”
– Gabriel Blackwell, author of Madeleine E.

“Incisive, sometimes alarming, sometimes deftly jarring, Polaris Ghost is a wonderfully uncomfortable unveiling of a life fraught with, well, life: parenting, addiction, struggle, and depression. Wilson’s beautifully composed fragments gradually collage their way into a sharply incisive portrait of not just one life but many.”
– Brian Evenson, author of A Collapse of Horses

You receive Polaris Ghost like a dark dream. But this is no fever-dream: the lucidity of Wilson’s prose is what makes this book spooky and off-kilter. Polaris Ghost reminds me of the early fiction of John Hawkes – The Cannibal or The Lime Twig – where the story’s world appears as though viewed through a microscope: both familiar and unfamiliar; detached but close-up; hypnotic. Savor this book. The rewards are plentiful.”
– John McNally, author of The Boy Who Really, Really Wanted to Have Sex: The Memoir of a Fat Kid

Dr. Wilson’s books include Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy, Everyone Loves a Good Train Wreck: Why We Can’t Look Away, How to Make a Soul: The Wisdom of John Keats, and My Business Is To Create: Blake’s Infinite Writing.