Where the North Sea Touches Alabama by Allen C. Shelton

Description

Part memoir, part ghost story, part sociological treatise. On a warm summer’s night in Athens, Georgia, the artist Patrik Keim took his own life — and his friend, the sociologist Allen C. Shelton, was left with a suitcase of Keim’s unfinished projects. In Where the North Sea Touches Alabama, Shelton transforms that loss into something extraordinary.

Published by the University of Chicago Press, the book ushers readers into realms of fantasy, revelation, and reflection, building a “psycho-sociological landscape” as evocative of Kafka, Bataille, and Benjamin as it is of Weber, Foucault, and Marx. From a pine coffin unearthed near Shelton’s Alabama farm to the art Keim left behind, it explores the author’s physical, historical, and social relationship to northeastern Alabama — and to a friend who refuses to stay buried.

Praised by critics as a powerful, deeply original achievement — essential reading for anyone drawn to experimental scholarship, Southern Gothic imagination, and the uncanny places where life and death touch.

On a warm summer’s night in Athens, Georgia, the artist Patrik Keim took his own life — and his friend, the sociologist Allen C. Shelton, was left with a suitcase of Keim’s unfinished projects. In Where the North Sea Touches Alabama, Shelton transforms that loss into something extraordinary: a genre-crossing work of “sociological fictocriticism” that moves between the world of the living and the world of the dead.

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Part memoir, part ghost story, part sociological treatise, the book ushers readers into realms of fantasy, revelation, and reflection, building a “psycho-sociological landscape” as evocative of Kafka, Bataille, and Benjamin as it is of Weber, Foucault, and Marx. From a pine coffin unearthed near Shelton’s Alabama farm to the art Keim left behind, it explores the author’s physical, historical, and social relationship to northeastern Alabama — and to a friend who refuses to stay buried.

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Published by the University of Chicago Press and praised by critics as “a powerful, deeply original” achievement, this is essential reading for anyone drawn to experimental scholarship, Southern Gothic imagination, and the uncanny places where life and death touch.