https://www.stefanmerrillblock.com/books daily 0.75 2025-07-22 https://www.stefanmerrillblock.com/news-bedford daily 0.75 2025-05-09 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/52a74d9ae4b0253945d2aee9/1400275370693-L0ZTMZY7L6SCYQG6GO85/xzuvhgdQGul0amA3Qc7a_373A9681.jpg News https://www.stefanmerrillblock.com/news-bedford/2014/1/23/get-out-there-wl9gl monthly 0.5 2014-04-13 https://www.stefanmerrillblock.com/news-bedford/2014/1/23/why-deserts-matter-too-sx9n9 monthly 0.5 2014-04-03 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/52a74d9ae4b0253945d2aee9/1390513173585-DWV4B9Z0B3GY1421D88O/tumblr_mjdttrQLOJ1rkz363o1_1280.jpg News - Why Deserts Matter Too https://www.stefanmerrillblock.com/news-bedford/2014/1/23/appalachia-34kek monthly 0.5 2014-09-30 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/52a74d9ae4b0253945d2aee9/1390512900953-CBP39T42JYJB4AT50XTE/tumblr_mjs7w6zIHV1rkz363o3_1280.jpg News - Success Story – New Hope in Old Appalachia https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/52a74d9ae4b0253945d2aee9/1390512900611-EF33OSHTK3F9FL7P3XQO/tumblr_mjs7w6zIHV1rkz363o5_1280.jpg News - Success Story – New Hope in Old Appalachia https://www.stefanmerrillblock.com/home daily 1.0 2025-08-08 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/599654da6f4ca35ca604dbf3/1276725d-ae20-43b8-9f67-7bcfe8923ef9/homeschooled+cover.jpg Home https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/599654da6f4ca35ca604dbf3/1508549856897-Y81U24QTPSNO74BO221M/TSOF1.jpg Home “A fresh, beguiling novel ... as true to the anguish of [its] questions as it is ablaze with love and vitality.” — Janet Maslin, The New York Times https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/599654da6f4ca35ca604dbf3/1508549875367-8DQDMJD0OJFKUFS78ISW/TSATD+for+website.jpg Home -       “Masterful … heartbreaking… [an] incredibly moving story of life, love, and mental illness … It’s this generation’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” -Publishers Weekly, Starred Review https://www.stefanmerrillblock.com/praise-tsof daily 0.75 2017-08-21 https://www.stefanmerrillblock.com/about-tsof daily 0.75 2017-10-21 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/599654da6f4ca35ca604dbf3/1503339444303-371QJAX8ZFD8GB4Z5DC5/TSOF1.jpg ABOUT - The Story of Forgetting In Stefan Merrill Block's extraordinary debut, three narratives intertwine to create a story that is by turns funny, smart, introspective, and revelatory. Abel Haggard is an elderly hunchback who haunts the remnants of his family's farm in the encroaching shadow of the Dallas suburbs, adrift in recollections of those he loved and lost long ago. As a young man, he believed himself to be "the one person too many"; now he is all that remains. Hundreds of miles to the south, in Austin, Seth Waller is a teenage "Master of Nothingness"-a prime specimen of that gangly, pimple-rashed, too-smart breed of adolescent that vanishes in a puff of sarcasm at the slightest threat of human contact. When his mother is diagnosed with a rare form of early-onset Alzheimer's, Seth sets out on a quest to find her lost relatives and to conduct an "empirical investigation" that will uncover the truth of her genetic history. Though neither knows of the other's existence, Abel and Seth are linked by a dual legacy: the disease that destroys the memories of those they love, and the story of Isidora-an edenic fantasy world free from the sorrows of remembrance, a land without memory where nothing is ever possessed, so nothing can be lost. Through the fusion of myth, science, and storytelling, this novel offers a dazzling illumination of the hard-learned truth that only through the loss of what we consider precious can we understand the value of what remains. https://www.stefanmerrillblock.com/excerpttsatd daily 0.75 2017-08-21 https://www.stefanmerrillblock.com/about-tsatd daily 0.75 2017-10-21 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/599654da6f4ca35ca604dbf3/1503285768126-UABVMQD8JKF4WEBC8SCV/TSATD+for+website.jpg About - The Storm at the Door The past is not past for Katharine Merrill. Even after two decades of volatile marriage, Katharine still believes she can have the life that she felt promised to her by her first exhilarating days with her husband Frederick. For those two months, just before Frederick left to fight in World War II, Katharine received his total attentiveness, his limitless charms, his astonishing range of intellect and wit. Over the years, however, as Frederick’s behavior and moods have darkened, Katharine has covered for him, trying to rein in his great manic passions and bridge his deep wells of darkness: an unending project of keeping up appearances and hoping for the best. But the project is failing. Increasingly, Frederick’s erratic behavior, amplified by alcohol, distresses Katharine and their four daughters, and gives his friends and family cause to worry for his sanity. When, in the summer of 1962, a cocktail party ends with her husband in handcuffs, Katharine makes a fateful decision: she commits Frederick to Mayflower Home, America’s most revered mental asylum. There, on the grounds of an opulent hospital populated by great poets, intellectuals and madmen, Frederick tries to transform his incarceration into a creative exercise, to take each meaninglessly passing moment and find the art within it. But as he lies on his room’s single mattress, Frederick wonders how he ever managed to be all that he once was: a father, a husband, a business executive. Under the faltering guidance of a self-obsessed psychiatrist, Frederick and his fellow patients must try to navigate their way through a gray-zone of depression, addiction, and insanity. Meanwhile, as she struggles to raise four young daughters, Katharine tries to find her way back to Frederick through her own ambiguities, delusions, and the damages done by her rose-colored belief in a life she no longer lives. Inspired by the author’s grandparents, this haunting love story shifts through time and reaches across generations. Along the way, Stefan Merrill Block stunningly illuminates an age-old truth: even if one’s daily life appears ordinary, one can still wage a silent, secret, extraordinary war. https://www.stefanmerrillblock.com/about-oliver daily 0.75 2017-10-21 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/599654da6f4ca35ca604dbf3/1503339810080-2Z04A6H25KXOKQ88GW4C/whole+cover.jpg About - Oliver Loving: A Novel From a celebrated literary talent comes a brilliant, propulsive novel about family, the traumas and secrets that test our deepest bonds, and the stories that hold us together. One warm, West Texas November night, a shy boy named Oliver Loving joins his classmates at Bliss County Day School’s annual dance, hoping for a glimpse of the object of his unrequited affections, an enigmatic Junior named Rebekkah Sterling. But as the music plays, a troubled young man sneaks in through the school’s back door. The dire choices this man makes that evening —and the unspoken story he carries— will tear the town of Bliss, Texas apart. Nearly ten years later, Oliver Loving still lies wordless and paralyzed at Crockett State Assisted Care Facility, the fate of his mind unclear. Orbiting the still point of Oliver’s hospital bed is a family transformed: Oliver’s mother, Eve, who keeps desperate vigil; Oliver’s brother, Charlie, who has fled for New York City only to discover he cannot escape the gravity of his shattered family; Oliver’s father, Jed, who tries to erase his memories with bourbon. And then there is Rebekkah Sterling, Oliver’s teenage love, who left Texas long ago and still refuses to speak about her own part in that tragic night. When a new medical test promises a key to unlock Oliver’s trapped mind, the town’s unanswered questions resurface with new urgency, as Oliver’s doctors and his family fight for a way for Oliver to finally communicate — and so also to tell the truth of what really happened that fateful night. A moving meditation on the transformative power of grief and love, a slyly affectionate look at the idiosyncrasies of family, and an emotionally-charged page-turner, Oliver Loving is an extraordinarily original novel that ventures into the unknowable and returns with the most fundamental truths. https://www.stefanmerrillblock.com/shop daily 0.75 2025-08-08 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/599654da6f4ca35ca604dbf3/1276725d-ae20-43b8-9f67-7bcfe8923ef9/homeschooled+cover.jpg SHOP - HOMESCHOOLED HarperCollins Amazon Barnes & Noble Books-A-Million Bookshop Walmart https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/599654da6f4ca35ca604dbf3/1503599010025-W5HYNNKHKGA70H2S16V1/whole+cover.jpg SHOP - OLIVER LOVING MacMillan Bookshop Amazon Barnes and Noble Books-A-Million Walmart https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/599654da6f4ca35ca604dbf3/1503599325284-V4QE5M0NDQ0FMIAUP1WI/TSOF1.jpg SHOP - THE STORY OF FORGETTING Random House Bookshop Amazon Barnes & Noble https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/599654da6f4ca35ca604dbf3/1503599548897-QHVV4I9WQK9SU4F5WWQN/TSATD+for+website.jpg SHOP - THE STORM AT THE DOOR Random House Bookshop Amazon Barnes & Noble https://www.stefanmerrillblock.com/contact daily 0.75 2026-03-27 https://www.stefanmerrillblock.com/bio daily 0.75 2026-01-14 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/599654da6f4ca35ca604dbf3/28cd19b5-d43d-4828-9464-d6b2eaea8530/Stefan+Merrill+Block+photo+by+Dana+McClure.jpeg BIO - Stefan Merrill Block Stefan grew up in Plano, Texas. He is the author of Homeschooled, a memoir, as well as three novels: The Story of Forgetting, The Storm at the Door, and Oliver Loving. Stefan’s fiction has been translated into ten languages, and his stories and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker Page-Turner, The Guardian, NPR’s Radiolab, GRANTA, and many other publications. 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