Castle Talk: Jack Dann on His Wild Alternate Venice Fantasy Shadows in the Stone

Tonight we’re chatting with Jack Dann, author of the alternate-Venice-fantasy book SHADOWS IN THE STONE from IFWG.
SHADOWS IN THE STONE
The author of The Age #1 bestselling novel The Memory Cathedral returns to Renaissance Italy with a transcendent vision of the ultimate battle between good and evil.
In Shadows in the Stone Jack Dann creates a fully-realized, living, breathing universe, a universe where the Vatican is in Venice, Jehovah is really a lesser god known as the Demiurge, and the magus John Dee’s experiments with angels are true and repeatable. Here you’ll discover a nun who has the expertise and agility of a Ninja warrior, the reincarnated snake goddess known as the Daughter of Light, the famed Florentine magician Pico Della Mirandola, a young magus who is part stone, the Knights Templar of the Crimson Cross, the sapphire tablet: the most secret of the Dead Sea scrolls, and a 15th Century dirigible kept aloft by imprisoned souls. Here you’ll find wild adventure and Machiavellian subtlety, treason and heroism, love and carnality, joy and loss, magic, machines, the cosmic machinations of angels, demons, gods, and half-gods; and the absolutely breathtaking vistas that are their battle grounds.
New York Times bestselling author Kim Stanley Robinson has compared Shadows in the Stonewith Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, calling it “such a complete world that Italian history no longer seems comprehensible without [Dann’s] cosmic battle of spiritual entities behind and within every historical actor and event.”
Join Jack Dann’s protagonists—Louisa Morgan and Lucian Ben-Hananiah—and the fellowship of The Dark Companions in their apocalyptic battle against the Demiurge—described in the forbidden Gnostic texts as the demon god Yaldabaoth… and known to us as Jehovah.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jack Dann has written or edited over seventy-five books, including the inter- national bestsellers The Memory Cathedral, The Rebel, The Silent, Bad Medicine, and The Man Who Melted. His work has been compared to Jorge Luis Borges, Roald Dahl, Lewis Carroll, Castaneda, Ray Bradbury, J. G. Ballard, Mark Twain, and Philip K. Dick. Library Journal called Dann “...a true poet who can create pictures with a few perfect words,” Best Sellers said that “Jack Dann is a mind-warlock whose magicks will confound, disorient, shock, and delight,” and bestselling author Morgan Llwelyn called his novel The Memory Cathedral “a book to cherish, a validation of the novelist’s art and fully worthy of its extraordinary subject. I can only say Bravo!”
Jack is a recipient of the Nebula Award, the World Fantasy Award (twice), the Australian Aurealis Award (three times), the Chronos Award, the Darrell Award for Best Mid-South Novel, the Ditmar Award (five times), the Peter McNamara Achievement Award and also the Peter McNamara Convenors’ Award for Excellence, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the Premios Gilgames de Narrativa Fantastica award. He has also been honored by the Mark Twain Society (Esteemed Knight). He is the co-editor, with Janeen Webb, of Dreaming Down-Under, which won the World Fantasy Award, and the editor of the sequel Dreaming Again. He is the managing director of PS Australia, and his latest anthology Dreaming in the Dark is the first volume in the new line: it won the World Fantasy Award in 2017. Dr. Dann is also an Adjunct Senior Research Fellow in the School of Communication and Arts at the University of Queensland.

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