The Golden Pot – A Fairytale for Our Time

A modernization of the old and famous fairy tale by the German Gothic storyteller E.T.A. Hoffmann. The comedy for young and old tells the story of the student Anselm MacGregor, who masters the dangers of his spiritual journey and moves from ignorance to enlightenment. It is set in the concrete jungle of today's Greater New Jersey/New York (Jersey City, Hoboken, Weehawken, Lower Manhattan), a highly unlikely place for fairy-tale deeds. Young Anselm, a penniless doctoral candidate in English literature at Empyrean U., survives on peanut butter sandwiches and gratefully takes a part-time job to transfer old manuscripts in mysterious languages to a computer for the archivist John Lindhurst, the head of special collections at the Stoneham Institute of Technology in Hoboken on the Hudson. He stumbles—by chance or fate—over an old feud between Lindhurst and the witch Lisa Ramirez, a Mexican bruja, in the first sentence of the book. They have been enemies for a long time, each with secret, mythical identities. Lisa was born from a toxic plant root, and he, Anselm, is a descendant of the noble salamander race of the Garden of Eden. By accident, he knocks over the old woman's chestnut cart, and nuts fly everywhere. “Your ass shall be behind glass! Your ass shall be behind glass!” she predicts angrily.

The book recounts Anselm's adventures and misfortunes while working for Lindhurst and dealing with ancient inscriptions (a metaphor for his psycho-spiritual training). Along the way, he courts the beautiful Tina, the old man's daughter, whose brilliant violin playing is as alluring as she is. She hails from the lineage of snakes: “Serpentina.” Her counterpart is Veronica (“Ronnie”), a stunning blonde and the daughter of Anselm's good friend Paul Manheim, a vice principal in Jersey City. Ronnie has eyes only for Anselm and dreams of the social status of the future professor's wife. On the advice of a friend whose fortune-telling abilities she values, she seeks out the witch Lisa to find out her chances with Anselm. Lisa gifts Ronnie a smartphone, “the smartest phone in the world,” with which she can spy on him from afar and influence his thoughts.

All this leads to one evening when they drunkenly throw glasses in Manheim's apartment, one of which shatters the ceramic urn containing the mortal remains of Manheim's wife. The next day, the hungover Anselm carelessly damages a manuscript at work and is promptly imprisoned in a glass bottle by Lindhurst for the “sin of negligence”—the witch’s prophecy is fulfilled. A battle between the forces of good and evil (“Armageddon Lite”) is triggered, wherein the salamander prince defeats the witch and her minions and frees Anselm from his glass prison. He marries Serpentina and moves with her to the island of Atlantis, which, as it is said, lies somewhere between Myrtle Beach and Maui.

Voices on Dennis McCort and The Golden Pot:

"Anyone who wishes to relive Hoffmann's fairy tale but doesn't want to return to Dresden in 1814, and would rather be in today’s New Jersey, should reach for Dennis McCort (...) You can feel on every page how much fun Dennis McCort had with this adaptation. An exquisite reading pleasure that transports Anselm's dreams and nightmares into our modern world and culminates in a globally encompassing, contradiction-overcoming vision. Original and very entertaining."

- Review on lovelybooks.

Further Information

Author Dennis McCort