I CHOSE ROTTEN GIN The story of a disillusioned Communist, who had not the courage to go against the party.
. . . so ostentatiously aimed at writing a masterpiece that, in a less ambitious work, one would be happy to call promising, for such readers as he may be fortunate enough to have . . .
—Glandvil Hix
OI CHITTERING ONES A serious work which urges us to lay aside our fears and realize our true
. . . the outside world of American life is described so imperfectly and so superficially as to make us feel that the novelist himself has never known it . . .
—M Axswill Gummer
THE R I COONS IGNITE Violence in a small southern community, the racial question delicately and faithfully dealt with.
. . . nowhere in this whole disgusting book is there a trace of kindness or sincerity or simple decency . . .
—S T Erlingnorf
TEN ECHOES RIOTING A delicately evocative novel.
. . . a delicately evocative novel . . .
—B R Endengill
. . . a literary event, of sorts . . .
—Newsleak Magazine
THE ONION CREST G I A rousing war novel, adventure with a tough talking sergeant from Wisconsin (the onion state).
. . . does not persuade us that it is based on any but a narrow and jaundiced view, a projection of private discontent . . .
—Milton R Goth
. . . another long and rather dreary saga of modem man in search of a soul . . .
—Baltimore Sun
THOSE NIGER CONTI Lusty romance with the Godzzoli family in love and the Italian secret service in Egypt.
. . . a complete lack of discipline . . .
—Kricket Reviews
THE TIGER ON SONIC A killer in provincial New England trapped by the brilliant deductions of the author’s popular armchair detective, Mr Ethan Frome.
. . . a really yummy read . . .
—D O’Lobeer
From William Gaddis’s novel J R. (The titles, I’m sure I don’t have to point out to you, dear reader, are all anagrams of The Recognitions).
Peter Tieryas’s United States of Japan — a “spiritual sequel to Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle” — -is forthcoming from Angry Robot. Their blurb:
Decades ago, Japan won the Second World War. Americans worship their infallible Emperor, and nobody believes that Japan’s conduct in the war was anything but exemplary. Nobody, that is, except the George Washingtons — a group of rebels fighting for freedom. Their latest terrorist tactic is to distribute an illegal video game that asks players to imagine what the world might be like if the United States had won the war instead.
Captain Beniko Ishimura’s job is to censor video games, and he’s tasked with getting to the bottom of this disturbing new development. But Ishimura’s hiding something…kind of. He’s slowly been discovering that the case of the George Washingtons is more complicated than it seems, and the subversive videogame’s origins are even more controversial and dangerous than the censors originally suspected.d
Steve Kemper’s biography of Frederick Russell Burnham, A Splendid Savage, is new in hardback from Norton. I interviewed Kemper a few years ago about A Labyrinth of Kingdoms, his biography of Heinrich Barth.
Norton’s blurb for A Splendid Savage:
A life of adventure and military daring on violent frontiers across the American West, Africa, Mexico, and the Klondike.
Frederick Russell Burnham’s (1861–1947) amazing story resembles a newsreel fused with a Saturday matinee thriller. One of the few people who could turn his garrulous friend Theodore Roosevelt into a listener, Burnham was once world-famous as “the American scout.” His expertise in woodcraft, learned from frontiersmen and Indians, helped inspire another friend, Robert Baden-Powell, to found the Boy Scouts. His adventures encompassed Apache wars and range feuds, booms and busts in mining camps around the globe, explorations in remote regions of Africa, and death-defying military feats that brought him renown and high honors. His skills led to his unusual appointment, as an American, to be Chief of Scouts for the British during the Boer War, where his daring exploits earned him the Distinguished Service Order from King Edward VII.
After a lifetime pursuing golden prospects from the deserts of Mexico and Africa to the tundra of the Klondike, Burnham found wealth, in his sixties, near his childhood home in southern California. Other men of his era had a few such adventures, but Burnham had them all. His friend H. Rider Haggard, author of many best-selling exotic tales, remarked, “In real life he is more interesting than any of my heroes of romance.”
Among other well-known individuals who figure in Burnham’s story are Cecil Rhodes and William Howard Taft, as well as some of the wealthiest men of the day, including John Hays Hammond, E. H. Harriman, Henry Payne Whitney, and the Guggenheim brothers.
Failure and tragedy streaked his life as well, but he was endlessly willing to set off into the unknown, where the future felt up for grabs and values worth dying for were at stake. Steve Kemper brings a quintessential American story to vivid life in this gripping biography.
According to Hyperallergic,
Researchers at the Bosch Research and Conservation Project (BRCP) have attributed another painting to the hands of Bosch that was previously classified as a work by a student or a follower. The newly authenticated Bosch has turned up in Kansas City, owned by the esteemed Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, which is renowned in particular for its extensive collection of Asian art. Acquired by the museum in the early 1930s, “The Temptation of St. Anthony” (c. 1500–10) depicts the saint, marked by the Tau cross on his cloak, filling a jug with water and surrounded by Bosch’s classic, bizarre beasts. The small panel, which remained in storage for years, will make its public debut at the Noordbrabants Museum in Hieronymus Bosch — Visions of Genius, an exhibition nine years in the making that brings together around 40 works from collections around the world.
From On the Slain Collegians: Selections from the poems of Herman Melville. Edited, and with woodcuts by Antonio Frasconi. Noonday Press, 1971.
Everybody has that feeling when they look at a work of art and it’s right, that sudden familiarity, a sort of…recognition, as though they were creating it themselves, as though it were being created through them while they look at it or listen to it…
The Recognitions, William Gaddis
Biblioklept 