Souls of Wind

If the philosophy textbook you kept from college managed to conceive a child with a dime-store Western, you¿d find yourself in possession of Souls of Wind, a novel where the 19th century French poet Arthur Rimbaud sits across a dining car table from a pistol-twirling Billy the Kid; where "All Along the Watchtower" is composed and sung around a campfire one hundred years before Bob Dylan is even born, and where persistent attempts to photograph a man result in the small, perfect image of a hummingbird. John Olson, with his story of Rimbaud¿s inner agitation and quest for beatitude in post-Civil War America, creates a novel of historical surrealism. Rimbaud takes to the frontier in an odyssey of heart, heat, and radical hunger with a paleontologist and his Nietzsche-loving daughter, seeking mammoth bones, enlightenment, and adventure.