Book Launch: Tom Shachtman, A JERICHO’S COBBLE MISCELLANY

Join author Tom Shachtman and interviewer Cynthia Hochswender for the launch of A JERICHO'S COBBLE MISCELLANY (April 2026, Madville Publishing), a genre-bending novel depicting a New England town through over 100 voices. Told via diaries, letters, and objects, it explores community, history, and tension.

This “miscellany” is a portrait of a fictional New England small town over the past several hundred years, celebratory and insightful, its stories recounted by more than a hundred voices, those of the living—white, Black, Native American, male, female, gay—and of the dead, and also of inanimate objects—a neglected upright piano, a bench along a nature trail—in poems, dialogues, roadside markers, tombstones, business brochures, newspaper articles, a playlet, diary entries, oral history transcripts, a stitched sampler, and even a nursery rhyme. Some tales are of quiet happiness, others of roiling passions, moral quandaries, tragedy and comedy; above all they speak to the centrality of community and continuity in our lives.

About the author

Author, filmmaker, and educator Tom Shachtman has written over forty books as well as television documentaries aired on ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, and other channels. He has lectured at universities from Harvard to Georgia Tech to Stanford, and at libraries from the New York Public to the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian, the Newberry in Chicago, and the Hoover Institution. His trilogy of books providing new perspectives on the American Revolution includes THE FOUNDING FORTUNES (2020); HOW THE FRENCH SAVED AMERICA (2017); and GENTLEMEN SCIENTISTS AND REVOLUTIONARIES (2014).

Advance praise for JERICHO'S COBBLE

An invitingly varied and intimate look at what makes a small town tick. —Kirkus Reviews

A patchwork quilt, stitched from voices, artifacts, and memories, it’s messy and alive, much like the New England hamlet it captures.  I found myself laughing at one passage and then feeling the weight of grief a page later. A Jericho’s Cobble Miscellany is about what it feels like to live in the shadow of history while stumbling through the present.  —Literary Titan

5 of 5 stars, a Must Read. —Reedsy Discovery: 

I loved it. Rich in detail, every turned page a surprise, the different voices animate and inanimate (I got a special kick out of “Lament for an Upright”), the vivid imagination, and much more. —John G. Ryden, Director Emeritus, The Yale University Press

I really love it … The orchestra of voices, alive and dead, works very well in evoking the feeling of place, the history of it, the complexity …. Each of the voices feels fully realized and fleshed out, even when brief. And the cumulative effect is that of a chorus, each holding a part of the story. —Eiren Caffall, 2023 Whiting Prize winner and author, The Mourner’s Bestiary, and All the Water in The World.