In 1888 in Victoria, Texas, for a simple job, a Chicago private eye gets caught up in the poker game to end all poker games. 
Shannon, a Chicago private detective, returns home to Galveston, Texas for a wedding. Galveston’s new rabbi asks Shannon to find Nathan Silverberg, gone missing along with a group of swindlers who claim to be soliciting money for a future colony of Romanian Jewish refugees.\nWhat seems to be a simple job soon pushes Shannon into stranger territory. His investigations lead him to a malevolent white-haired gambler, monstrous sand dune totems, and a group of skull-headed poker players trapped in an endless loop of cards and alcohol, who may be his only means to survive the business.\nWith The Silverberg Business, Robert Freeman Wexler has delivered a gloriously strange hard-boiled tale that crosses genres and defies expectations.

The Silverberg Business: a novel

Literature & Fiction

Wexler, Robert Freeman

Genre Fiction

Small Beer Press

Robert Freeman Wexler's potent blend of urban realism and fantasy-"North American Surrealism" is the term Jeff VanderMeer has coined for Wexler's work-is on full display in his second novel, which makes its US debut some 12 years after its initial limited-edition publication in the UK. . At a mundane Manhattan party in the first summer of the twenty-first century, sculptor Jacob Lerner catches sight of an old painting and is transfixed. Who is the woman it portrays so intently? And what accounts for the malevolent gaze of the figure lurking behind her? Striving to produce art that meets his high standards, without surrender to the demands of the marketplace, Lerner is also driven to learn about the haunting portrait and its creator, Philip Schuyler. His discovery of Schuyler's journal reveals the sinister forces that coerced the artist as he fulfilled his commission in 1840s New York, and sharpens Lerner's own conflict with those forces that still control the modern city. Propelled in his quest by a glass marionette with unusual powers, Lerner finds himself slipping back and forth in time between the present-day city and Schuyler's Manhattan, before the island's pastures and streams were buried under concrete. His obsession comes to dominate his own art: he produces a pair of works, one that recovers the promise of the preindustrial island; the other a visualization of the modern metropolis, corrupted by greed and entrenched interests, and its possible destruction. With his vision of a city in ruins, open to regeneration through nature and art, Lerner arrives at a cataclysmic conclusion.

The Painting and the City

Literary

The Visible Spectrum

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