AMERICAN FEVER: A TALE OF ROMANCE & PESTILENCE
New York-based filmmaker David Rodriguez has won Arterial Witness’s global contest to make the best video trailer for our novel, American Fever: A Tale of Romance & Pestilence. (See it and other honored entries.) The news came on Friday, Sept. 28, during a lively celebration at cinema-bar IndieScreen in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
The party featured viewings of video entries from artists on three continents, interspersed with musical performances by Patrick Grant, Milica Paranosic, Gene Pritsker, Dan Cooper, Lynn Bechtold, Daniel Palkowsky, and Cesare Papetti, appearing variously as Composers Concordance Trio, Erbium, and Patrick Grant.
“This video is great,” author Peter Christian Hall told Rodriguez. “It moves powerfully—really captures the sweep of the novel’s events.” Still, he said, ‘I’m glad I put the word ‘romance’ in the title.” (American Fever: A Tale of Romance & Pestilence (synopsis) presents an East Village blogger’s view of a harrowing H5N1 avian flu pandemic that rocks America and unleashes national repression, even as his personal life explodes with promise.)
Hall read from American Fever and previewed a passage from his forthcoming novel, Luc.
In addition to a $1,000 check for his work, Rodriguez received a copy of American Fever, autographed by GANG OF FOUR’s Andy Gill—who composed and recorded the stirring music for the video—and by Hall. who also honored further contestants with non-cash awards: Catalin Stancu took the Audience Award and “Most Romantic;” Michael Pfeiffer won for “Scariest;” Amy Elson, “Funniest;” George Ingram Jr., “Most Microbial;” and Ziya Morris, 15, for “Talent & Pluck.” (They appear here, in sequence below Rodriguez’s winning video.)
American Fever is “a modern take on Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year” (Kirkus Reviews) that has been hailed as “compelling” (Publisher’s Weekly PW Select), “suspenseful and terrifying”(Midwest Book Review), and “by far the best stab at the future of the novel I’ve seen” (TeleRead).
We are proud of David’s video!
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