Weeping with an Ancient God

by Ted Morrissey

Weeping with an Ancient God is a novella set in the Marquesas Islands in the summer of 1842. The protagonist, Melvill, has jumped ship from the whaler Acushnet in a wild, savage and exotically beautiful land. Melvill contemplates his dangerous present, his sad past and his wholly uncertain future on an island teeming with cannibals.The novella is based on author Herman Melville's real-life adventures as a young seaman.

162 pages, Kindle Edition

First published August 14, 2014

About the author

Ted Morrissey is the author of two books of scholarship and five books of fiction—Crowsong for the Stricken, Weeping with an Ancient God, An Untimely Frost, Figures in Blue, and Men of Winter. Chicago Book Review listed Weeping with an Ancient God as a Best Book of 2015. His stories and novel excerpts have appeared in more than fifty journals, among them Glimmer Train, ink&coda, and Southern Humanities Review. His novel Mrs Saville has been serially published at Strands Lit Sphere. In addition to teaching high school English, he also teaches in the MFA in Writing program (online) for Lindenwood University. He and his wife Melissa, an educator and children’s author, have five children and two rescue dogs. Ted is also the founding publisher of Twelve Winters Press, which he based on Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press.