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Readers Who Seek to Reflect on Holocaust Remembrance Day are Being...

April 29, 2005 -- Readers who seek to reflect on Holocaust Remembrance Day, commemorated May 5 this year, are being given the opportunity with the recent release of "The Discontinuity of Small Things" (Quality Words In Print), an extraordinary new novel by Kevin Haworth, which is being called "a quiet book of the Holocaust".



Haworth, who currently lives in Athens, Ohio, is accumulating early praise for the just-released novel, which detail the lives of ordinary people living in Denmark during the German occupation in 1943. According to Publisher's Weekly, this "thoroughly imagined debut" is an "engrossing historical novel [which] details a bright spot in a dark era."



Kevin Haworth attributes his earliest inspirations for the novel to observations he made at a photography exhibition:



"When I was in the Masters program at Arizona State I came across a photo exhibit in the student center - scenes from Denmark that had been important in the Danish Resistance and the rescue of Jews. Most of the photos - taken fifty years after the fact - showed empty spaces: a stretch of beach where Jews had stood; the pavement outside a hospital where a man had fallen from a window.



I became obsessed with filling in those spaces - empty holes into which great history had once been pored. At the time I had never been to Denmark and knew little about this small, marginalized Holocaust story. When I began to research and write, first from books and photographs, then in Denmark itself, I found the kind of contradictions that any writer would recognize as the stuff of fiction: An occupation that involved almost no violence, and which the Germans described as a "great understanding" between themselves and the Danish government. Jews who fled and then returned to their homes as if little had transpired. A war waged mostly by pamphlet."



"The Discontinuity of Small Things" is a "quiet" story of the Holocaust--a subtle story of fate, of interruptions, and of simple, everyday hardships. In Denmark, the "lovely country by the sea", fisherman, students, and housewives are among those subject to the disquieting strictures of martial law. Haworth shows how war sometimes begins in people's lives as an inconvenience, an interruption in the efficacy and ordering of small things, then evolves into harrowing occasions, fateful moments of choice, heroism, or cowardice. He reveals in his characters a consciousness that teems with both immediacy and longing, compelling readers by depicting the delicate overlap of memory, apprehension, and impulse. This novel, the product of eight years of dedicated research and writing, marks his emergence as a significant new voice in historical fiction.



Melissa Pritchard, a respected author and creative writing instructor at the renowned Arizona State University Writer's Program, calls the work "a gorgeously realized novel" that "cries out to be read, pondered and remembered for its tribute to and condemnation of a war that evoked both immense evil and courage of heroic proportion."



Author Kevin Haworth was born in Brooklyn, New York. He earned his B.A. in English from Vassar College and his M. F. A. in Fiction Writing from Arizona State University. A two-time resident of the Vermont Studio Center, he is also a winner of the David Dornstein Prize for Young Jewish Writers and the Permafrost Fiction Prize. He currently teaches Writing and English Literature at Ohio University.



For Additional Information or a Reader's Copy of "The Discontinuity of Small Things," please contact Holly C. Gruber at Quality Words In Print, (714) 436-5700 or e-mail protected from spam bots.



"The Discontinuity of Small Things" by Kevin Haworth (hardcover, 240 pages, $23.95) was published by Quality Words In Print in May 2005, and is available through major internet booksellers and selected bookstores.



Quality Words In Print is an independent publisher of literary fiction and non-fiction based in Costa Mesa, California.



Contact Information:

Holly Gruber

Quality Words In Print

(714) 436-5700

e-mail protected from spam bots

www.qwipbooks.com

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