Dear Editor:
I am querying you as to a possible review of Down to a Sunless Sea.
This short story collection presents a variety of styles, providing a different reading experience — poetic, journalistic, nostalgic, wrlyly humorous and even macabre. “Herbie” was listed in Martha Foley’s The Best American Short Stories of 1974. I was in good company that year — Norman Mailer, Joyce Carol Oates, and I.B. Singer, among others. Nine of these stories have been published in the “little” magazines over the years, the most recent in 2007 in France, La Fenetre.
The range is wide, yet the common thread is to compel the reader to feel for these characters. Readers are plunged into uncomfortable situations and into the minds of troubled, complex human beings.
In Down to a Sunless Sea to be understood — to be felt — is given ardent, strong and imaginative voice. Tracy-Jane Newton, a British editor, Alternative-Read. com, writes: “Mathias B. Freese has the ability, without mawkishness or sentimentality, to delve into the struggles of life.” David Herrle, editor and founder of Subtle Tea, best sums up my efforts: “Dare to observe shadow dwellers limelit by sometimes austere, always wired and deep Freese, tune your taste ‘for a dose of Freudian sauce,’ and don’t be too daunted by the tinge of suspicious ash in the sunless air.”
An award-winning essayist and author of The i Tetralogy, a historical fiction about the Holocaust which has garnered remarkable praise around the world, the weight of my twenty-five years as a psychotherapist comes into play as I hopefully demonstrate a vivid understanding — and compassion — toward the deviant and damaged.
Down to a Sunless Sea has just won the 2008 Allbooks Review Editor’s Choice Award. This is my second Allbooks Award, the first for The i Tetralogy, a powerful and uncompromising study of the death camps during the Holocaust. I am listed on Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble.
Sincerely,
Mathias B. Freese
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