The Forest - by Alexander Nemerov

About the Book

"Set amid the glimmering lakes and disappearing forests of the United States in the 1830s, The Forest: A Fable of America in the 1830s imagines how individuals at the time experienced their lives. Part truth, part fiction, this book follows painters, poets, enslaved individuals, farmers, and artisans through various settings. Some, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Nat Turner, Thomas Cole, and Edgar Allan Poe, are well-known; others are not. All are creators of private and grand designs, and makers of the worlds they inhabited. The Forest unfolds in brief stories. Each is an episode revealing a lost world of intricate relations: human beings going their own ways or crossing paths, in a place that is known to history, or is remote and unknown. For Alex Nemerov, the forest is a description of American society, as he writes, "the dense and discontinuous woods of nation, the foliating thoughts of different people, each with their separate life to lead." Nemerov's art history is at its center an experiment in writing, in how to write differently about visual culture. The Forest examines the history of the United States on a human scale, displaying the patterns of life alongside examples of paintings, prints, photographs and objects"--

Book Synopsis

A vivid historical imagining of life in the early United States

"One of the richest books ever to come my way."--Annie Proulx, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Shipping News

"This is a wonderful book. . . . An extraordinary achievement."--Edmund de Waal, New York Times bestselling author of The Hare with Amber Eyes

Set amid the glimmering lakes and disappearing forests of the early United States, The Forest imagines how a wide variety of Americans experienced their lives. Part truth, part fiction, and featuring both real and invented characters, the book follows painters, poets, enslaved people, farmers, and artisans living and working in a world still made largely of wood. Some of the historical characters--such as Thomas Cole, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Fanny Kemble, Edgar Allan Poe, and Nat Turner--are well known, while others are not. But all are creators of private and grand designs.

The Forest unfolds in brief stories. Each episode reveals an intricate lost world. Characters cross paths or go their own ways, each striving for something different but together forming a pattern of life. For Alexander Nemerov, the forest is a description of American society, the dense and discontinuous woods of nation, the foliating thoughts of different people, each with their separate shade and sun. Through vivid descriptions of the people, sights, smells, and sounds of Jacksonian America, illustrated with paintings, prints, and photographs, The Forest brings American history to life on a human scale.

Published in association with the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

Review Quotes

"This is the story collection you didn't know you need to read. The central theme is the great push of commerce and expansion of vast wild lands. The feelings are tangible of resonant energy in densest forests and hallowing absence in cleared lands. Wander these extraordinary writings and feel the otherness that distanced and draws you in this brilliant book. It's like nothing I've read before."---Marilyn Smith, Kepler's Books

"Beautifully designed and a pleasure to hold, The Forest is one of 2023's most intellectually unshackled books--and one of its best."-- "Point Reyes Books"

"The prose is lyric verging on the poetical, nonfiction verging on the speculative, but each of these often fantastical-seeming stories ends up getting buttressed by a veritable grove of references and cross-references in a Notes section at the back of the book, such that by the end who knows, or would necessarily want to know."-- "Lawrence Weschler"

"A book to be savored like poetry--start or finish your day with a few of these lush vignettes of early America's forests and the artists, criminals, and visionaries who passed through them, poised between history and myth. I've never felt the nature of America's past--the trees and skies--quite like this."---Nora Sternlof, RJ Julia Booksellers

"A history of a lost era that's as moving and profound as great fiction. I'm not sure I've ever read anything that brought the past to such vivid life and made me feel so much like a time traveler."---James Crossley, Madison Books Seattle

"

The Forest is Alexander Nemerov's eccentric, impressionistic and strangely hypnotic reconstruction of American life before deforestation and standardisation. . . . Nemerov captures the fleeting spirit of a changing place.

"---Dominic Green, The Spectator

"The stories are strikingly written with a siren-like poetic draw. . . . [An] historic, sylvan delight."---Kassie Rose, The Longest Chapter

"[In] The Forest, readers have a chance to walk through the woods of the early 1800s--and discover that the often contradictory ways we relate to nature now have been with us at least since then. . . . [The book] peers closely at the art of the period in order to better capture how people then felt, thought and dreamed about themselves and the land."---Kiley Bense, Inside Climate News

"Alexander Nemerov . . . brings [an] unruly and uncanny world to life in his new book, The Forest. Neither history nor fiction, the book unspools over dozens of gem-like stories of man's last real encounters with these ancient forests: Nat Turner's woodland hiding place, the inscription of the Cherokee language both on trail trees and on paper, Harriet Tubman's view of the Leonid meteor shower, the painter Thomas Cole's top hat of felted-beaver fur."---Stephanie Bastek, Smarty Pants podcast

"This vibrant collection liberally envisions America's early cultural life through its forests, from Nathaniel Hawthorne, for whom trees were 'arbors of thought, ' to Nat Turner, who planned his rebellion while secluded in the woods."-- "New York Times"

"For each scene, [Alexander Nemerov] seems to have asked himself not merely how things would have looked in the 1830s but also how they would have sounded, felt, tasted and smelled. The Forest is easily one of the most pungent books I've read, an encyclopedia of vintage odors. . . . After you've read this book, most other cultural histories will seem as stale as the straw on the floor."---Jackson Arn, Wall Street Journal

"I really wish I'd written this book. The Forest is what one might dubiously call 'a nonfiction novel, ' taking as it does the lives, both real and imagined, of multiple early inhabitants of America's great forests--artists, tradesmen, farmers, poets, enslaved people--and turning them into fictionalized episodes. . . . This is history imagined as ecology."---Jonny Diamond, Literary Hub

"[A] beguiling study of American intellectual and cultural life two centuries ago at the places where forests and civilization met."-- "Kirkus Reviews starred review"

About the Author

Alexander Nemerov is the Carl and Marilynn Thoma Provostial Professor in the Arts and Humanities at Stanford University. His many books include Fierce Poise: Helen Frankenthaler and 1950s New York and Soulmaker: The Times of Lewis Hine (Princeton).