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MACLEISH SQ.
Reviews & Comments

MacLeish Sq. is a compelling psychological novel about personal identity, about loss, about delusion, and about the power of literature, of story, to make sense of one’s life. This is a world of lost souls. In a work heavily imbued with the irreal, reminiscent at times of Poe, Must’s two doppelganger protagonists, fractured and alienated, wrestle with their haunted pasts in pursuit of authentic selfhood. A masterful work of fiction. —Jack Smith, author of If Winter Comes.


MacLeish Sq. approaches mythic status in which time, character, past, present, alive, dead—just a few of the literary polarities inhabiting this writing—interact at a level no reader can accept without relinquishing his/her own sense of person and being. Interweaving Dante, Melville, Hawthorne, and Pirandello into a single narrative that seizes the essence of each, Must puts them together with such skill that the author lives on par with the masters. It will take an honest reader to admit—I have never read anything like this.
Jack Remick, THE DACTYL REVIEW

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MacLeish Sq. pulls one in and keeps the reader turning the pages. The author’s prose is as lyrical and absorbing as the tale. It is peppered with references to the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville and unfolds one layer at a time. Intricate pencil illustrations by Russ Spitkovsky add yet another layer to the telling of this intriguing story. Fans of psychological novels will find this one enchanting. It will likely be a satisfying read for those who enjoy losing themselves in a mystical, spiritual, Faulkneresque story, complete with a surprising ending. Glenda Vosburgh, THE US REVIEW of BOOKS

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MacLeish Sq., illusion challenges reality and invades the unsettled past. The narrative depicts a strange realm haunted by the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville. Here, the Charles Bridge leads to the site of the Salem Witch Trial executions. Bartleby the Scrivener can be found at the Falling Man Tavern, near the Cotton Mather Hotel and Hester Alley. Within a flow of keen recollections and displaced spirits, MacLeish Sq. is the story of a man approaching the “final trimester” of his being. Meg Nola, FOREWORD REVIEWS

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John Proctor is about to turn seventy when he decides to buy a small farmhouse on the outskirts of the now mostly desolate mill town where he had grown up. Nostalgia haunts his waking hours and he often reminisces about the happier times in his life. One day in wintertime, John sees a young man in a mackinaw jacket with cloth sneakers that are soaked. He invites him in for some hot tea with lemon. Little does he know how this young man would impact his life most unexpectedly. Read MacLeishSq. by Dennis Must to find out more. Cloie Belle Daffon, READERS’ FAVORITE

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As with many of Dennis Must’s other fictions, consisting of three novels and three short story collections, MacLeish Sq. is a tale about personal identity. Who are we, and how do we come to know the nature of our being in this world? In this most recent novel, what the imagination seizes just might be true, or if not absolutely true, at least one valid means of coming to know ourselves, perhaps much more so than through reason or ratiocination. But literature as storytelling is a second means. In this novel, the principal literature is that of the nineteenth-century American Romantic era, of Hawthorne and Melville, but add to that drafts of unpublished stories preserved in old notebooks as well. What do these stories tell us about our own lives and who we are? What is real? MacLeish Sq. is a highly imaginative novel, stylistically brilliant, which contrasts the real with the irreal, the latter being the most compelling—and the most transformative. Jack Smith, CALIFORNIA REVIEW OF BOOKS

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MacLeish Sq., Dennis Must’s curiously appealing new novel, takes the reader through the obscure final act of a man’s life. The main character, sixty-nine-year-old John Proctor, buys an old farmhouse on the outskirts of the desolate New England mill town he grew up in—the town he left when he was eighteen. Upon returning, John wishes for nothing but to settle “down here outside the derelict mill town of my childhood to savor the days each sunup deigns to grant me.” AMERICAN WRITING AWARDS

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Reality shifts and reforms in disquieting and disorientating ways in MacLeish Sq., the latest novel by Dennis Must, as the unlikely hero recognizes that he has reached the final phase of his life and reluctantly embarks on a metaphysical odyssey that leaves him questioning the nature of his current existence and reevaluating the sins of his past. As fact and fiction combine in increasingly dynamic ways and it becomes ever more difficult to separate the real from the unreal, the quester merges with the quest and the Rubicon of sanity is seemingly crossed. Erin Britton, INDEPENDENT BOOK REVIEW

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