Oakland- Allen C. Shelton discusses and signs "Where the North Sea Touches Alabama"

Oakland Events

Allen C. Sheltont at DIESEL, A BookstoreDiesel, A Bookstore in Oakland welcomes Allen C. Shelton to the store to discuss and sign his new book, Where the North Sea Touches Alabama, on Monday, August 18th at 7pm.

On a warm summer’s night in Athens, Georgia, Patrik Keim stuck a pistol into his mouth and pulled the trigger. Keim was an artist, and the room in which he died was an assemblage of the tools of his particular trade: the floor and table were covered with images, while a pair of large scissors, glue, electrical tape, and some dentures shared space with a pile of old medical journals, butcher knives, and various other small objects. Keim had cleared a space on the floor, and the wall directly behind him was bare. His body completed the tableau. Art and artists often end in tragedy and obscurity, but Keim’s story doesn’t end with his death.

A few years later, 180 miles away from Keim’s grave, a bulldozer operator uncovered a pine coffin in an old beaver swamp down the road from Allen C. Shelton’s farm. He quickly reburied it, but Shelton, a friend of Keim’s who had a suitcase of his unfinished projects, became convinced that his friend wasn’t dead and fixed in the ground, but moving between this world and the next in a traveling coffin in search of his incomplete work.

In Where the North Sea Touches Alabama, Shelton ushers us into realms of fantasy, revelation, and reflection, paced with a slow unfurling of magical correspondences. Though he is trained as a sociologist, this is a genre-crossing work of literature, a two-sided ethnography: one from the world of the living and the other from the world of the dead.

Allen C. Shelton is an associate professor of sociology at SUNY Buffalo State and the author of Dreamworlds of Alabama. He lives in Buffalo, New York, next to Billy Sunday’s first church and an old Italian grocery store, and within a half-mile of an abandoned nineteenth-century asylum. There are no pine trees.

Event date: 
Monday, August 18, 2014 - 7:00pm
Event address: 
5433 College Ave
94618-1502 Oakland
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Where the North Sea Touches Alabama By Allen C. Shelton Cover Image
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ISBN: 9780226073224
Published: University of Chicago Press - October 25th, 2013