Farewell Tour, the poetic new book from Michael Williams , is now available in print and eBook editions! A true literary masterpiece that is an accompaniment to his 15-year City Quartet Project awaits you! ! Pick up a copy at the direct links below!
Direct Purchase Links
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eBook Editions
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Synopsis of Farewell Tour:
FAREWELL TOUR is the crown and dark accompaniment to Michael Williams’ 15-year CITY QUARTET PROJECT, but it stands on its own as a culminating work.
Apache Downs, a wanderer without direction, awakens in a misty stupor on the fourth floor of a public library. He wanders from the building into his home town, his surroundings estranged by memory and dream. He hears a voice telling his story as he finds his way through a layered landscape, uncertain as to where he is headed and increasingly uneasy as to what the journey means.
Blurbs about Farewell Tour:
“More than a book of nightmares, more than a universe in a grain of sand, Michael Williams’ FAREWELL TOUR is an epic Blakean Dantean Joycean Odyssian Taoist Tiresian Ulyssean narrative sutraic journey through the orphic underworld, a prose poem that navigates into, through, and beyond ancient and modern myth, exploding all epistemological liminal paradoxical boundaries, ghost to ghost, coast to coast, on its way to uncharted territories, to the shadow realms of the creative imagination. More than a land of literary dragons, FAREWELL TOUR is the guidebook for a new literature. Michael Williams’ FAREWELL TOUR is a masterpiece, a Bodhi Tree miracle.”
-Ron Whitehead, U.S. National Lifetime Beat Poet Laureate
“This summer I took a train trip across the country. We passed a landscape of barren fields, beautiful mountains and rivers, warehouses and homeless camps. This epic poem-story is a train rolling through the author’s life in which the author, drunk on words, gives us a view of the landscape that is him.”
-Margaret Weis, Author, Dragonlance
“In FAREWELL TOUR, Michael Williams draws threads from his CITY QUARTET set of interrelated books to weave a dream of introspection. Identity, self-identification, mis-identification, re-invention, and the effect that one person’s struggles with these have on the struggles of those around them blend into an active meditation on where “we” leave off and “they” begin. Even the setting (a city, its central park, and the walking court leading off it) shares DNA with the beings who inhabit or pass through it. If you want to use a search engine to self-annotate FAREWELL TOUR, you can learn things. But, first and foremost, dive into this luminous pool of words and be enchanted and moved.”
–Marian Allen, Per Bastet Books
About Michael Williams:
The author of fifteen novels, a number of stories and poems, and the late, lamented “Mythical Realism” travel blog, Michael Williams has been writing and publishing over the last thirty years. Michael Williams has written a number of strange novels, from the early Weasel’s Luck and Galen Beknighted in the best-selling Dragonlance series to the lyrical and experimental Arcady, singled out for praise by Locus and Asimov’s magazines.
His most recent work includes the acclaimed City Quartet, centered on a city both realistic and mythical: in Trajan’s Arch, stories fold into stories and a boy grows up with ghostly mentors; Vine: An Urban Legend mingles Greek tragedy and urban legend, as a local dramatic production in a small city goes humorously, then horrifically, awry; Dominic’s Ghosts takes up the story of a son in search of his father in the midst of a murky conspiracy involving a suspicious scholar, a Himalayan legend, and subliminal clues from a silent film festival. Tattered Men is the account of a disheveled biographer, writing the life story of a homeless man who may have been more than he ever seemed.
Williams was born in Louisville, Ky, and spent much of his childhood in the south central part of the state, the red-dirt gothic home of the Appalachian foothills and stories of Confederate guerillas. Through good luck and a roundabout journey he made his way through New England, New York, Wisconsin, Britian, and Ireland, and has ended more or less where he began. He has a Ph.D in Humanities, and taught at the University of Louisville until 2022, where he focused on the Modern Fantastic in fiction and film. Michael is a member of the Imagination Hall of Fame. He is married to Rhonda Williams and they have two grown sons.
His most recent work is a long narrative poem set in the world of the City Quartet. Because what’s a quartet without a fifth?