ars ipsa loquitur
THE FOURTH WINTER
BY QUINN TYLER JACKSON
Nearly three decades after surviving a Himalayan winter that changed the course of his life, novelist Cohen Benjamin returns to India with editor Valery Rockford, writer Conrad Kirk, and martial artist Brett Lloyd-Ronan. Their purpose is simple, in principle: discover what really happened in the mountains during the winter of 1988–89.
But memory is an imperfect witness, and Cohen has spent a lifetime turning experience into fiction. As police reports, old records, remembered conversations, and long-buried truths begin to challenge the stories he has told himself and others, the journey becomes an inquiry into grief, friendship, love, artistic responsibility, and the consequences of choices that cannot be rewritten.
The Fourth Winter is a literary novel about the stories we create to survive the past—and what happens when those stories become refuges from accountability.
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The past has another witness: Cohen’s own work. In the hands of his editor and companion, Valery, fragments frozen in amber from across his literary career begin to reveal not merely how he transformed experience—and people whose lives had intersected with his own—into fiction, but what he understood long before taking responsibility for it.
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Paris, San Francisco, Vancouver, New York, India, Gabriola Island ... no matter where we go... there we are....
About Jackson's Novels
“The sheer brilliance and sprezzatura of Jackson’s ideas, and his ability to articulate these in fluid, gorgeous, and startlingly original prose and poetry, will capture and hold your attention.”
—Dania Sheldon, from the foreword of
Touched by Fortune's Shadow
“Through arduous life experience the author provides a glimpse at his changing perspective, his growth, and the environment that forever changed him…. This meditative culmination of the author’s work is rarely seen in literature.” — TJP, Amazon review of Midnight at the Arcanum: a monograph
“The danger of reading [Lament] is that you might not understand it. The danger of understanding [it] is that it might drive you insane.... The great thing ... is that one does not have to understand all of it to enjoy it.” — E. Clay, Goodreads review of
Lament of an Architect of Babel
“What impresses me about Jackson’s work is that he recognizes the role of work in art and seriously works at it with thought and sensitivity. It is also scholarly: like a mathematician, addressing all the possibilities critically.” — Fred Candelaria, Poet, Founder/Editor of West Coast Review, on Hiroshima in Stained Glass
“With great precision and attention to detail, [Jackson] makes this complex area of the world come alive in the reader’s imagination - but this is merely one amongst several strokes of authorial genius which fall between the covers of this fine book; there [are also] ... beautifully-rendered sidelong shifts and actual reversals of time, space, and perspective, many of which allow for different interpretations of the main characters’ thoughts and deeds, and all of which defy easy description but are consummately achieved. [Jackson] is particularly adept at conveying the strangely altered and slippery nature of a person’s conception of Time during periods of psychological and social upheaval.” — Drop the Buddha of Hiroshima in Stained Glass
Quinn Tyler Jackson has been a bookseller’s assistant, a freelance editor, a literary agent, an independent publisher, and a mathematician. Jackson is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a member of the Writers’ Union of Canada. His award-winning work spans nearly four decades and includes novels, short story collections, poetry, and short fiction published in literary magazines and online journals.
He lives on Gabriola Island in British Columbia with his beloved, where they make their home a cat sanctuary. He continues to write fiction and poetry, paint, compose and perform music, and conduct scientific research.
