*Coming March 2026*
Three wealthy and prominent men commission an eccentric Albany-based independent scholar of the Iroquois named Samuel Kip in late 1723 to write a disquisition on the first one hundred years of the New York colony.
Kip’s pen - meditative and divergent - is only one reason for his selection: his great grandfather, Jessé de Forest, was a Huguenot separatist and the leader of a group of Walloons, many of whom were the earliest European settlers of the land that now encompasses the area in and around New York City. Kip’s narrative follows de Forest and a number of other early actors in the European settlement of the Americas, trailing them in vignettes - some fictive, some historic - that map land and country as much as they do God (or its absence), war, aspiration and love.
Rooted in Sterne’s excursion, Pynchon’s confab, Eliot’s scale and Donne’s fragment, Houghteling’s The Forest marks a high point for twenty-first-century modernism.
jack[dot]houghteling[at]gmail[dot]com