Literary Fiction
"...comedy and tragedy, across decades and continents, with a dizzying abruptness and energy."
The Books
The Feet Say Run is the story of a life spent running--a literary novel that is also a suspenseful page-turner, a work at once emotionally gripping and darkly comic.
In his waning years, Hans Jaeger finds himself stranded on a desert island—the last island not mapped by modern GPS — with a small band of survivors. What is my particular crime? he asks. Why have I been chosen for this fate?
And so he begins the chronicle of his long life--a tale of Nazi Germany, the Jewish girl he loved, and his years fighting with the Wehrmacht. His war experiences are vividly individual—a struggle for survival in the most harrowing of circumstances—and yet also the broader story of the cruelty and absurdity of the Nazi regime, the madness of men, and of war itself.
Hans’s story is the story of all the madness, irony and horror of the modern world--and the story of one man who finds redemption only when there's nowhere left to run.
The Author
Dan Blum grew up in New York, received a BA from Brandeis University, and currently resides in Wellesley, Massachusetts with his family and cat. He writes novels, poetry and satirical pieces, many of which appear in his blog, The Rotting Post. He has previously published a novel under a pseudonym. This is his first published novel under his real name. He enjoys hiking, tennis, chess, and word-games, and can peel an entire apple in a single motion without ever tearing the peel.
Dan says of his writing:
In my own reading I am drawn to serious, “literary” writers - winners of the National Book Award, the Pulitzer, and so on. And many of these are fine books. Yet too often I am frustrated that our literature has become ponderous to the point where it neglects the basic art of storytelling: drawing in the reader, keeping the plot moving forward, making the reader smile or laugh or ache. Why, I thought to myself, can’t a book be poetic and intellectually stimulating, and still be gripping and fast-paced and intense? This is what I have tried to write, because it is what I like to read.