From acclaimed novelist Charles Portis comes this comic masterpiece of secret societies, lost cities, and American dreamers. Stationed in France in 1917, Lamar Jimmerson comes across a little book crammed with Atlantean puzzles, Egyptian riddles, and extended alchemical metaphors. It's the Codex Pappus—the sacred Gnomon text. Soon he is basking in the lore of lost Atlantis, convinced that his mission on earth is to extend the ranks of this noble brotherhood. He forms the Gnomon Society, an international fraternal order dedicated to preserving that lost city's arcane wisdom. From the publication of Jimmerson's own Gnomic texts, through the schism that rocks the Gnomic community, to the fateful gathering of the Gnomons in a mobile-home park in East Texas, Masters of Atlantis is a cockeyed journey into an America of misfits and con-men, oddballs and innocents.