Blue Monkeys

$20.00

L. Shapley Bassen latest work is available, published by Shy City House!

L. Shapley Bassen latest work is available, published by Shy City House!

Meet the modern translators of the lost language of Atlantis and their NYC neighbors -- follow the ancient Mediterranean copper trade to Indigenous 'Kitchi-Gami' [Lake Superior]. What begins as a New York story expands over space and Time, from Manhattan to ancient Crete, from the Hamptons to Yellowstone Park & Seattle. Through multi-cultural/-national/-racial/-gendered characters AND a book intercut within the novel written by two Bronze Age experts, BLUE MONKEYS spans 2019 – 2022 – and the continental USA - ancient/modern Aegean. The novel begins in Spring, 2019, as NYTimes journalist David Rochester and his TV star husband Alan Tapley move from LA with their twin toddler sons & Nanny Mercedes to the ninth floor of a NYC Beaux Arts apartment building on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Here, the people and events they encounter include the autumn arrival of a new tenant who is murdered within a month -- and a global pandemic. By novel’s end (plus Coda in forward-looking 2022), septuagenarians Pidge & Pearl, the Columbia University scholars acclaimed as the first to decipher an ancient language, Minoan Linear A, move from Manhattan to an island off Seattle.