Aladdin & Co.: A Romance of Yankee Magic

A delegate named Albert Barslow stands amid the noise of a national political convention, but his mind has drifted somewhere far more compelling: toward Alice, the woman who has upended his carefully ordered life. Herbert Quick's vanished gem of early American fiction weaves together romance, ambition, and the peculiar magic of believing anything is possible in a young country. As Barslow navigates the circus of politics, he must also navigate the more treacherous terrain of his own heart, while around him other suitors circle the object of his affection and developers scheme to reshape a town called Lattimore in their own image. The novel captures a specific American moment when the old order was giving way to something wilder, more optimistic, more dangerous. Quick writes with sharp eye for the gap between public performance and private longing, between the speeches politicians make and the dreams that keep ordinary people awake at night. This is a story about what we sacrifice for ambition, what we gain when we dare to want something badly enough, and whether the magic we believe in is the kind that comes from without or from within.