Even before his birth, Johnny Baker's life is in danger. His mother breaks the law when she has her fertilized egg endowed with genes that will give her son the potential to become a visual artist. Born in 2038, John Firth Baker is the first genetically engineered artist. At the age of nineteen, at the threshold of his career, he is murdered. Now, ten years after his death, Baker has become famous. An art curator has organized a show of his work, and his biography-culled from journals, e-mails, and interviews with those who knew him best-is published. The Song of the Earth is this "biography." It presents a powerful and haunting portrait of an artist as a young man in the twenty-first century.Baker is born into a world transformed by technology: genetic profiles, space travel, and controlled housing communities are commonplace. Global warming has altered the environment. A planetary gender war is raging, familial structures are shattered, and new religions contend...

"Nissenson, acclaimed for his powerful narratives (The Days of Awe; The Tree of Life), here shows the tight grip of religious devotion on one young man's mind ... History, politics, faith, and daily life all come together in a strong story."– Library JournalPraise for High Nissenson's The Days of Awe:"I just finished The Days of Awe. I am too moved to move. (Even this pen.) An amazing novel. It is as if we are eavesdropping on life."– Cynthia Ozick"If you believe the best novels should be transformative, should rip the dusty curtains from our everyday vision; if you don't mind being terrorized by a narrative, then you'll be looking at a different world when you finish these pages."– Carolyn See, Washington Post"A deep affirmation of life in all its mystery and agony and joy."– Frederick M. Dolan, author of Allegories of America"Nissenson's haunting, deeply moral novel asks the largest questions, and with tough lyric elegance, illuminates the smallest moments. The Days of Awe is a Great Awakening elegy for all our lives even as we live them."– Johanna Kaplan, author of 0 My America"A Masterpiece!"– Amos Elon, author of The Pity of It AllReview"Nissenson, acclaimed for his powerful narratives (The Days of Awe; The Tree of Life), here shows the tight grip of religious devotion on one young man's mind... History, politics, faith, and daily life all come together in a strong story." - Library Journal"Nissenson has penned a bleak, unsparing novel, peopled with flawed humans and accurate period details." - Historical Novel Review"The Pilgrim is such a delightful find. Hugh Nissenson's moody, intelligent novel is about a tormented English Puritan who strikes out for the Plymouth Plantation in 1622... It conjures up that dangerous black magic spell that the most powerful historical novels cast: The Pilgrim makes us feel that, even if this version of the past isn't quite accurate, this is the version we wholeheartedly believe - at least for the space of reading."" - NPR.org"Nissenson spins a compelling historical tale steeped in the religious and cultural customs of the original Puritans... The authentically rendered first-person perspective that propels the narrative illuminates both Wentworth's prolonged dark night of the soul and his daily trials and experiences. " - Booklist""The reader is transported back to the earliest days of the settling of America by the sworn statement of one Charles Wentworth, who came to Plymouth soon after the Mayflower landing. The powerful influence of religion and the church is portrayed through his struggles with both his humanity and his faith, as Charles mourns the tragic loss of his betrothed while at the same time reveling in the death of the 'savages' who must be conquered to create a safe new home. This is a great work of historical fiction" " - ""Hugh Nissenson's vision of a re-created society and ethos is remarkable, the language crafted out of plainness and purity – a plainness and purity which, both in the individual phrase and cumulatively, rise to majesty. The Pilgrim is a masterwork of fierceness, insight, inhabitation, and relentless power." -Cynthia Ozick, author of Foreign Bodies" - ""A lustrous recreation. Hugh Nissenson has taken the ore of research and transmuted it into the gold of art. The Pilgrim is impossible to put down until the final words. And then they continue to carom endlessly in the mind." -Stefan Kanfer, author of Tough Without a Gun (recent Bogart bio), Ball of Fire (Lucille Ball bio), Groucho " - ""Hugh Nissenson's The Pilgrim is a startling, beautiful, numinous prose-poem about the founding of our country. It will surely be enshrined forever in the canon of American literature." -Johanna Kaplan, O My America!, Other People's Lives" - About the AuthorHugh Nissenson is the author of eight books, including The Days of Awe. His novel The Tree of Life was a finalist for the National Book Award and the PEN-Faulkner Award in 1985. He lives in New York City.