Philip D. Beidler, the Margaret and William Going Professor of English at The University of Alabama, appreciates the literary prose of “The Secret of Magic,” winner of the 2015 Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction.
Beidler writes: Here in “The Secret of Magic,” we encounter the familiar omniscience of traditional realism, but with a stunning versatility—narration, description, dialogue, interior monologue, along with flashback, jump cut, interweavings of parallel texts. Altogether it makes for a completeness of what Henry James called “density of detail, solidity of specification, the air of reality”—or, to cite his fellow combatant in the realism wars, W.D. Howells, the world brought back to us “in faithful effigy.”
The novel, written by Deborah Johnson, will be celebrated at a ceremony Thursday, Sept. 3 at the Library of Congress.
For more, read “Book Note: An Appreciation Of ‘The Secret of Magic,’ A Novel By Deborah Johnson.”
