FICTION
Meet the modern translators of the lost language of Atlantis – and their New York City neighbors. Follow the Mediterranean Bronze Age copper trade to North American Lake Superior. BLUE MONKEYS is a novel about epic journeys joining together the past and the present, from the Mediterranean Bronze Age copper trade to modern day New Yorkers from everywhere, who travel to the ends of their wits, islands, across continents and oceans, finding harbors in strange places and people. My older brother is a MacArthur Genius sitting on a neuroscience Chair at NYU now after a dozen years at Rockefeller U. So I know the science people in the novel, as well as the homicide detective who falls in love with one of them. The gay and trans characters are also familiars as well. I can’t say I knew 3600 year old Cretan Pasikennae [who ends her long life in the Scottish Orkney Islands], but if I’ve channeled her, I’m grateful. As for translators Pidge & Pearl, professors at Columbia in their 70’s living in the Upper West Side 80’s [Pearl’s Shoshone], I directly contacted leaders at the Shoshoni Language Project at Idaho State U. and studied their Shoshone grammar book! BLUE MONKEYS is an upbeat, inclusive story.
L. Shapley Bassen 