American Music by Jane Mendelsohn

This collection of excerpts is from Jane Mendelsohn's novel, American Music, offering glimpses into a sprawling narrative that spans multiple time periods and interconnected characters. The text focuses heavily on Honor, a woman providing therapeutic bodywork to Milo Hatch, a young veteran with a spinal cord injury and PTSD, whose physical contact unleashes vivid, seemingly unrelated memories of other people's lives. These transported memories primarily center on a jazz musician named Joe, his wife Pearl, and his mistress Vivian in 1936 New York, as well as an artist named Iris and her husband Alex Michaels in the late 1960s/early 1970s. Further historical threads introduce a 17th-century narrative concerning Parvin, a dancer in the Ottoman Sultan's harem, an alchemist named Avedis, and a eunuch named Hyacinth, establishing complex themes of love, fate, trauma, and the mysterious nature of interconnected human experience.