MICHAEL ROBERT LISKA with Valerie Stivers

The seafaring-adventure-story has been a foundational American text as early as Herman Melville, and Alice, or The Wild Girl, a debut novel by Michael Robert Liska, presents a cynical and contemporary new take on the genre. In this funny and grim work, whose inventive, dislocated narrative voice is part of the mystery, a middle-aged lieutenant in the 1850s named Henry Aaron Bird is determined to put his name on any “savage” and “uninhabited” rock in the Pacific. Bird’s grand ambitions result in the discovery only of the detritus of his own culture, in the form of a single, helpless young girl, a castaway from a previous voyage.