Spotlight: Greetings from Asbury Park by Daniel H. Turtel

In a small, seaside city on the Jersey Shore, three half-siblings confront the death of a distant and bullying patriarch. They now have the chance to imagine new relationships and new futures, ones that would have been near-unthinkable while their father was alive.

At the heart of the novel are Casey and Gabrielle who are pushed toward a brief but torrential affair composed of equal parts love for one another and resentment for their father. Caught in their crossfire are the conservative religious communities that border Asbury Park, the longtime locals who have been pushed to the fringe by the shore's revitalization, and the legendary town upon which the whole world seems to converge. Slowly, however, they come to understand that everything depends--their future, their happiness--on whether they can face themselves.

Wise, perceptive, and provocative, Greetings from Asbury Park is a remarkable literary debut in the tradition of great American novels such as Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio. It is a deep interrogation of place that depicts flawed characters as they breakthrough to adulthood, truth, and to a moral relationship with the world.

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About the Author

Daniel Turtel grew up on the Jersey Shore. He graduated from Duke University in 2013 with a degree in mathematics and has been living in New York City since. In 2020 Greetings from Asbury Park was awarded the Faulkner Society’s Best Novel Award. In 2018, he won the Faulkner Society’s annual competition in both the novella and novel-in-progress categories, for Among the Porcelain and Greetings from Asbury Park, respectively. His novels have also been short-listed in the Del Sol Press First Novel Competition and the James Jones Literary Society’s First Novel Fellowship, and his short fiction has been published in The Baltimore Review.