Please click the image below to go on over the Spotify and listen to the sample chapter of Locus Amoenus. If you laugh out loud, you have to post a comment below, and, if you do, you can request a code to listen to the entire audiobook for free.
Please rate the audiobook on Spotify when you’re done.
With the recent release, finally, of the Locus Amoenus audiobook on all listening platforms, it’s time to reacquaint my readers with that 9/11 novel. Among the many interviews I gave in 2015, this remains my favorite. Barrett, a 9/11 truth activist, is also a very well-read academic, whose appreciation for literary works is notable.
“Until now, the only 9/11 themed novel of high literary quality was Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge. Locus Amoenus is the best fictional treatment of 9/11 yet. It’s hilarious, darkly ironic, playful, deeply moving.” –Kevin Barrett
The audiobook is available on all listening platforms, including Spotify, Nook, Kobo, Libro, StoryTel, Hoopla, and Google Play.
My 2015 novel, Locus Amoenus, is a dark comedy featuring Hamlet as a 9/11 conspiracy theorist. The audiobook is the last great work by Emmy-award winning actor Ben Jorgensen. It has finally been released on all listening platforms, including Spotify, Nook, Kobo, Libro, StoryTel, Hoopla, and Google Play. (Not yet on Audible. Soon.)
Want a coupon to listen for free on Spotify? If you plan to review the novel on Amazon, Goodreads, your own blog or social media page, or any listening platform, make a request for a coupon for free audiobook access via the contact page.
Ben Jorgensen began his acting career as the boy in Calvin Klein’s Obsession commercials directed by Richard Avedon. His credits include feature films, The Break with Martin Sheen and The Basketball Diaries with Leonardo DiCaprio. He won Emmy and GLAD awards for his portrayal of the gay teen Kevin Sheffield in All My Children and also had a feature role in As the World Turns. His theater credits include What Will People Think!?, a Strawberry festival finalist, A Season in the Congo at La Mama, Hamlet (as the ghost) and Trial and Treason in the lead role as President in 2015. He also wrote and acted in the original play Manny’s Last Stand, starring Austin Pendleton, which opened the Summer Strawberry festival in 2013.
Ben was suicided by the lockdowns in 2020.
Having gone through the Co\/iD-I984 debacle, many people have lost trust in the media and government. And they are wondering if the news wasn’t trustworthy about past emergencies, such as the attack on 9/11.
In the article linked below, which appears on Free the People, a new media organization, I discuss my decision to write Locus Amoenus, a dark satire about 9/11, which was published in 2015.
This week, the audiobook has finally been released on all listening platforms, including Spotify, Nook, Kobo, Libro, StoryTel, Hoopla, and Google Play. (Not yet on Audible. Soon.)
It’s news in Amenia when a local novelist starts thinking about writing. Over salads at Four Brothers Pizza in Amenia, I chatted with fellow novelist, Steve Hopkins, about my plans to continue the story line of my 2015 novel, Locus Amoenus. That book is a satire about a 9/11 widow who remarries and her son Hamlet becomes depressed. You get the idea. I think of the new work as a Hamlet Part 2, or possibly Covid-1984, or Covid 9/11, or some other such satire in the posthumous style.
Seeing my plans in print, I’m committed now to writing it. In fact, the work has begun. Thank you, Steve, for getting me started.
George Orwell’s works seems rather too relevant these days. But his Winston Smith is unlikable, without wit or irony. He is not funny. This tragedy needs some dark humor. And a happy ending.
This month the Strange Recital features Ben Jorgensen reading Chapter One of Locus Amoenus. Following the reading, the show hosts, Tom and Brent, interview Victoria Alexander about writing that novel and working on the sequel.
“As you drive northeast through Dutchess County in upstate New York, farm scenes strike calendar poses: leaning barns, well-tended white Victorians, winding roads tunneling through overhanging maples.”
A pastoral paradise… but is there something dark under the surface? Troubles in America manifest in the personal. Let Hamlet tell you about it.
I am very excited to announced that Locus Amoenus has received the LFBR 2016 award for “excellence in literary fiction.”
Locus Amoenus by Victoria N. Alexander centers upon the bucolic county seat of Amenia in upstate New York where Gertrude and her son Hamlet make their home after the horror of 9/11 deprived them of husband and father respectively. Seeking a new start in the rural quiet, Gertrude purchases a sheep farm where they intend to live a sustainable lifestyle butchering their own livestock, growing vegetables, and eschewing the material trappings and celebrity-devotion of the modern world. The Webutuck school district, where Hamlet attends classes, greet Gertrude’s healthy food campaign with suspicion and distrust; populated by overweight teachers overseeing equally rotund students, they are all fed on processed, Continue reading
Locus Amoenus, 9/11 novel by Victoria N. Alexander, has been nominated for the 2016 Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Since 2007, the DLPP has awarded $10,000 each year. Previous recipients include, Bob Shacochis for The Woman Who Lost Her Soul, Junot Díaz for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and Francine Prose for A Changed Man. The 2016 winner will be announced in September.
Locus Amoenus is now available as an audiobook, narrated by award-winning actor Ben Jorgensen, from Audible.com and iTunes. Continue reading
Activist/archivist Johny Genlock recorded my talk at Dunn Brothers Coffee in Dallas area on Nov 29 for his YouTube Channel.
“A Fictional account combining elements of our post 9/11 culture of conflicting realities and the plot of Shakespeare’s Hamlet; set in a small town environs of New York State. Locus Amoenus, a “safe place”, turns out to be anything but! Victoria Alexander gives us samples of the book while explaining the elements that went into the creative project.“
Locus Amoenus, a New Novel
9/11 as a Shakespearian Tragedy
Wayne Coste
The new novel by Victoria N. Alexander, Locus Amoenus, is a delight to read. It weaves an important modern-day tale while following the outline of William Shakespeare’s enduring tragedy, Hamlet. The Bard’s tale of Hamlet is a personal and community tragedy placed in a historical period in which the fight over the control of Hamlet’s native country ultimately leads to its subjugation to a foreign country. The characters woven into the Locus Amoenus story are no less tragic than Shakespeare’s, and the reader is left wondering just how the world of Alexander’s characters could have avoided being seduced into a current-day form of subjugation when the curtain comes down. Throughout her witty narrative, the author’s wry humor adds levity to her tale of today’s Hamlet. Continue reading