Ghosts Doing the Orange Dance

A Confederate veteran revisits a haunted battleground outside of Petersburg, Virginia. Many years later, his great-grandson returns obsessively to a mansion (now a museum) in southern Vermont, the scene of an unsolved murder. In the late eighteenth century, in eastern Connecticut, a separatist minister receives a visit from a flying saucer, while, coincidentally, a young officer takes the stand at his own court-martial in 1919. Not a hundred and fifty years further on, a beautiful young woman self-destructs in New York State, while two hundred miles and a mere generation away, an old woman dances on a cold Rhode Island beach. In Ghosts Doing the Orange Dance, Paul Park braids these and other seemingly mutually exclusive strands, and the resulting text, part memoir and part fiction, could serve as a last will and testament not only for Park himself, but also for John Crowley and Elizabeth Hand, old friends who, through a series of oversights, have guided it towards publication.