HEIDEGGER'S GLASSES, the first book to be published by Phoenix, in it's new direction as a serious literary press, is coming out this May.  The Editor-in-Chief has been consulting me about the cover, and I just got this write-up for an advance promotion on Amazon. (There's one there now for the Audio, but the Editor-in-Chief thought it was too purple.)

Heidegger’s Glasses opens during the end of World War II in a failing Germany coming apart at its seams.  The Third Reich’s obsession with scrupulous record-keep and its strong reliance on the occult, has led to the formation of an underground compound of scribes –translators responsible for answering letters written by prisoners in concentration camps often moments before they were led to the gas chambers.

Into this covert compound comes a letter written by eminent philosopher Martin Heidegger to his optometrist, a man now lost in the dying thralls of Auschwitz.  How will the scribes answer this letter?  The presence of Heidegger’s words –one simple letter in a place filled with letters – sparks a series of events that will ultimately threaten the safety and well-being of the entire compound.

Part love story, part thriller, part meditation on how the dead are remembered and history is presented, with threads of Heidegger’s philosophy woven throughout, the novel evocatively illustrates the Holocaust through an almost dreamlike state. Thaisa Frank deftly reconstructs the landscape of Nazi Germany from an entirely original vantage point.