Cover to the 1990 reprint edition published by Vukelich’s North Country Press.
Cambridge Book Review Press is delighted to announce that digital rights have been secured to publish a Kindle ebook edition of Fisherman’s Beach, the masterful novel by the late Wisconsin author and long-time Madison newspaper columnist and radio-host George Vukelich (1927-1995). Originally published in 1962 by St. Martin’s Press, Fisherman’s Beach is a remarkably assured debut novel charting the postwar struggles of a Catholic fishing clan in Two Rivers, Wisconsin. The family is headed by a dying patriarch, Old Man LeMere. Often at odds with his Irish wife, his five sons, not to mention his doctor and his priest, LeMere represents a tradition and moral force that seem to be breaking down around him. Writer August Derleth, with whom Vukelich studied following a stint in the Merchant Marine during the Second World War, said that Fisherman’s Beach is “one of the best family novels of our time—not the family novel that moves from one generation to another … but the novel that is the portrait of the family seen at a time of crisis.” Vukelich’s sturdy naturalism has kept the novel’s style timeless and fresh. And in its depiction of a family business battling state politicians over fishing rights, Fisherman’s Beach touches on an all-too-contemporary Wisconsin theme: political power and its abuse.
Watch for Fisherman’s Beach in ebook format coming in spring 2012 from Cambridge Book Review Press.
[Update 10/9/11: Read Doug Moe’s Wisconsin State Journal column about CBR Press and the origins of the Fisherman’s Beach ebook project.]
[Update 4/10/12: Fisherman’s Beach ebook now available!]
Coffee Spew 