The train is on the move.

In Scarsdale, New York, a man spent the 1930s making lists of eunuchs—castrated men—all over the world and throughout history. What were their personalities like? he wondered. Why not use their stories to tell history? His handwritten notes filled thousands of pages.

Before he was forty, he killed himself.

In this train ride of an American biography, Tucker Lieberman tells the story of the would-be scholar of eunuchs. E. D. Cumming was born into great wealth and lived during two world wars. He might have become a railroad businessman, but what most interested him was the meaning of living as a castrated man. The story told here is tender, angry, freighted with intensity, and thoroughly experimental.

Weaving personal reflections and analysis, Lieberman explores why a writer might not finish a book. A lack of focus? A problem of fate? The number forty? Or is the rough draft haunted, and, if so, what could be created in its place? Our lives, he observes, have certain features that constrain us and determine our fate.

Ten Past Noon: Focus and Fate at Forty

by Tucker Lieberman

Publisher: Glyph Torrent, 2020

Almost ready! This will be available to purchase in February or March 2020.

ISBN 978-1-7329060-4-4 Paperback

ISBN 978-1-7329060-5-1 eBook