Shadows in Summerland

＂Loosely based on the lives of spirit photographer William H. Mumler and his wife, Shadows in Summerland transports readers to 1859 Boston, where those who promise access to the otherworldly--mediums, spiritualists, and psychics--are celebrated. This embrace of illusion and intrigue provides the perfect hunting ground for con artists and charlatans--men like William Mumler. When William teams up with Hannah, a shy young girl who sees and manifests the dead, they are welcomed into the drawing rooms of the city’s elite. But the couple’s newfound fame and fortune draw grifters and rogues into their circle, including someone who will bring the afterlife closer to them than they could ever imagine＂--

Adrian Van Young is the author of two books: The Man Who Noticed Everything, a collection of stories; and Shadows in Summerland, a novel. His fiction, nonfiction, and criticism have been published or are forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, Conjunctions, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, Slate, VICE, The Believer, the New Yorker, and Granta, as well as the anthologies Gigantic Worlds, Mechanical Animals: Tales at the Crux of Creatures and Tech, and Tiny Crimes: Very Short Tales of Mystery and Murder, among others. Van Young attended Columbia University’s MFA program in fiction, receiving a Henfield Prize. In the years since, he won Black Lawrence Press’s St. Lawrence Book Award for his first collection of stories, and has twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. He has taught English and creative writing at the undergraduate and high school levels for more than a decade. Van Young lives with his family in New Orleans.