Tag: Mass-Market Monday

Mass-market Monday | Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker

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Star Maker, Olaf Stapledon. Penguin Books (1973). Cover design by David Pelham. 268 pages.

Here is the first paragraph of Star Maker:

ONE night when I had tasted bitterness I went out on to the hill. Dark heather checked my feet. Below marched the suburban lamps. Windows, their curtains drawn, were shut eyes, inwardly watching the lives of dreams. Beyond the sea’s level darkness a lighthouse pulsed. Overhead, obscurity. I distinguished our own house, our islet in the tumultuous and bitter currents of the world. There, for a decade and a half, we two, so different in quality, had grown in and in to one another, for mutual support and nourishment, in intricate symbiosis. There daily we planned our several undertakings, and recounted the day’s oddities and vexations. There letters piled up to be answered, socks to be darned. There the children were born, those sudden new lives. There, under that roof, our own two lives, recalcitrant sometimes to one another, were all the while thankfully one, one larger, more conscious life than either alone.

More David Pelham covers here.

Mass-market Monday | John Steinbeck’s In Dubious Battle

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In Dubious Battle, John Steinbeck. Penguin Books (1979). Cover design by Neil Stuart. 313 pages.

John Steinbeck’s underrated and under-read novel In Dubious Battle seems like a good Labor Day mass-market pick. Perhaps Steinbeck’s most radical novel, In Dubious Battle details the fight for better working conditions during the Great Depression in California’s fruit orchards. The hero is young Jim Nolan who joins a labor strike organized by the Communist Party (one of the Party’s officials is named Harry Nilson). Jim is taken under the wing of the veteran organizer Mac McLeod; the pair drive a plot that focuses on the sometimes violent conflict between the workers and the landowners, who use the police and hired thugs to attempt to break the strike. Steinbeck, as is often the case with his serious novels, caps In Dubious Battle with a devastating conclusion, the final line a howl that does not end, its dash carrying the battle into the future, our own future: “Comrades! He didn’t want nothing for himself—“

Mass-market Monday | Gene Wolfe’s The Shadow of the Torturer

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The Shadow of the Torturer, Gene Wolfe. Timescape/Pocket Books (1981). No cover designer or artist credited. 262 pages.

While no cover artist is credited, Don Maitz is the artist for this edition of The Shadow of the Torturer, as well as for the other three books in Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun tetralogy. Maitz is credited on the dust jackets of the original hardback first editions (Simon & Schuster) of the series.

The Book of the New Sun is absolutely astounding.

From Peter Bebergal’s 2015 New Yorker profile on Wolfe, “Sci-Fi’s Difficult Genius”:

For science-fiction readers, “The Book of the New Sun” is roughly what “Ulysses” is to fans of the modern novel: far more people own a copy than have read it all the way through. A surreal bildungsroman, the book centers on a character named Severian. Trained as a torturer on the planet Urth, where torturers are a feared and powerful guild, Severian betrays his order by showing mercy, allowing a prisoner to kill herself rather than be subjected to his terrible ministrations. He then wanders the land encountering giants, anarchists, and members of religious cults. He eventually meets and supplants the ruler of Urth, the Autarch.

The four books that make up the series are sometimes vexing. A wise reader will keep a dictionary nearby, but it won’t always prove useful. Though Wolfe relies merely on the strangeness of English—rather than creating a new language, like Elven or Klingon—he nonetheless dredges up some truly obscure words: cataphract, fuligin, metamynodon, cacogens. The setting appears medieval, but slowly we tease out that what is ancient to these characters was once our own possible future. A desert’s sands are the glass of a great city, and the creaking steel walls that make up Severian’s cell in the guild dormitory is likely an ancient spaceship. Reading “The Book of the New Sun” is dizzying; at times, you become convinced that you have cracked a riddle, and yet the answer fails to illuminate the rest of the story. Wolfe doesn’t reveal the truth behind any of the central mysteries explicitly, but lets them carry the narrative along. At first, one hopes that they will eventually be resolved. Ultimately, they become less important than Severian’s quest for his own truth.

Mass-market Monday | William Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses

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Go Down, Moses, William Faulkner. Vintage Books Edition (1971). Cover photo by Robert Wenkham. 383 pages.

Go Down, Moses is my favorite William Faulkner text (some say it’s a collection of stories, but I think it’s a novel). “The Bear” might be the best thing he wrote. Read the opener, “Was.” 

From “Was”:

Isaac McCaslin, ‘Uncle Ike’, past seventy and nearer eighty than he ever corroborated any more, a widower now and uncle to half a county and father to no one

this was not something participated in or even seen by himself, but by his elder cousin, McCaslin Edmonds, grandson of Isaac’s father’s sister and so descended by the distaff, yet notwithstanding the inheritor, and in his time the bequestor, of that which some had thought then and some still thought should have been Isaac’s, since his was the name in which the title to the land had first been granted from the Indian patent and which some of the descendants of his father’s slaves still bore in the land. But Isaac was not one of these:-a widower these twenty years, who in all his life had owned but one object more than he could wear and carry in his pockets and his hands at one time, and this was the narrow iron cot and the stained lean mattress which he used camping in the woods for deer and bear or for fishing or simply because he loved the woods; who owned no property and never desired te since the earth was no man’s but all men’s, as light and air and weather were; who lived still in the cheap frame bungalow in Jefferson which his wife’s father gave them on their marriage and which his wife had willed to him at her death and which he had pretended to accept, acquiesce to, to humor her, ease her going but which was not his, will or not, chancery dying wishes mortmain possession or whatever, himself merely holding it for his wife’s sister and her children who had lived in it with him since his wife’s death, holding himself welcome to live in one room of it as he had during his wife’s time or she during her time or the sister-in-law and her children during the rest of his and after not something he had participated in or even remembered except from the hearing, the listening, come to him through and from his cousin McCaslin born in 1850 and sixteen years his senior and hence, his own father being near seventy when Isaac, an only child, was born. rather his brother than cousin and rather his father than either, out of the old time, the old days.

When he and Uncle Buck ran back to the house from discovering that Tomey’s Turl had run again, they heard Uncle Buddy cursing and bellowing in the kitchen, then the fox and the dogs came out of the kitchen and crossed the hall into the dogs’ room and they heard them run through the dogs’ room into his and Uncle Buck’s room then they saw them cross the hall again into Uncle Buddy’s room and heard them run through Uncle Buddy’s room into the kitchen. Where Uncle Buddy was picking the breakfast up out of the ashes and wiping it off with his apron. “What in damn’s hell do you mean,” he said “turning that damn fox out with the dogs all loose in the house?”

“Damn the fox” Uncle Buck said. “Tomey’s Turl has broke out again. Give me and Cass some breakfast quick we might just barely catch him before he gets there.”

Mass-market Monday | Paulo Emílio Sales Gomes’s P’s Three Women

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P’s Three Women, Paulo Emílio Sales Gomes. Translation by Margaret A. Neves. Avon Bard (1984). No cover artist credited. 136 pages.

Gomes’s only novel got a reprint from Dalkey Archive back in 2012 with a new introduction by translator Margaret Neves, who notes that in “Portuguese, the title of this book is Trés Mulheres de trés PPPés. The expression “p-p-p” means chitchat, bla-bla-bla. Hence, three women and their chitchats. In addition to echoing the narrator’s first initial, the term is lightly condescending to the women, just like P himself.”

Mass-market Monday | Stanley Elkin’s The Living End

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The Living End, Stanley Elkin. First Warner Books printing (1980). Cover art by Don Ivan Punchatz; cover design by Gene Light; cover type by Richard Nebiola. 141 pages.

An excerpt from The Living End:

God gave a gala, a levee at the Lord’s.

All Heaven turned out.

“Gimme,” He said, that old time religion.” His audience beamed. They cheered, they ate it up. They nudged each other in Paradise.

“What did I tell you?” He demanded over their enthusiasm.

“It’s terrific, isn’t it? I told you it would be terrific. All you ever had to do was play nice. Are you disappointed? Is this Heaven? Is this God’s country? In your wildest dreams-let Me hear it. Good-in your wildest dreams, did you dream such a Treasury, this museum Paradise? Did you dream My thrones and dominions, My angels in fly-over? My seraphim disporting like dolphins, tumbling God’s sky in high Heaven’s high acrobacy? Did you imagine the miracles casual as card tricks, or ever suspect free lunch could taste so good? They should see you now, eh? They should see you now, trembling in rapture like neurological rut. Delicious, correct? Piety a la mode! That’s it, that’s right. Sing hallelujah! Sing Hizzoner’s hosannas, Jehovah’s gee whiz! Well,” God said, .1 that’s enough, that will do.” He looked toward the Holy Family, studying them for a moment.

“Not like the creche, eh?” He said.

“Well is it? Is it?” He demanded of Jesus.

“No,” Christ said softly.

“No,” God said, “not like the creche. just look
at this place- the dancing waters and indirect lighting. I could put gambling in here, off-track betting. Oh, oh, My costume jewelry ways, My game show vision.

Well, it’s the public. You’ve got to give it what it wants. Yes, Jesus?”

“Yes,” Jesus said.

“It just doesn’t look lived in, is that what you think

“Call on someone else,” Christ said.

“Sure,” God said.

“I’m Hero of Heaven. I call on Myself.”

That was when He began His explanations. He revealed the secrets of books, of pictures and music, telling them all manner of things-why marches were more selfish than anthems, lieder less stirring than scat, why landscapes were to be preferred over portraits, how statues of women were superior to statues of men but less impressive than engravings on postage. He explained why dentistry was a purer science than astronomy, biography a higher form than dance. He told them how to choose wines and why solos were more acceptable to Him than duets. He told them the secret causes of inflation-“It’s the markup,” He said-and which was the best color and how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. He explained why English was the first language at Miss Universe pageants and recited highlights from the eighteen-minute gap.

Mary, wondering if she showed yet, was glad Joseph was seated next to her. Determined to look proud, she deliberately took her husband’s hand. So rough, she thought, such stubby fingers. He explained why children suffered and showed them how to do the latest disco steps. He showed them how to square the circle, cautioning afterwards that it would be wrong.

He revealed the name of Kennedy’s assassin and told how to shop for used cars.

Mass-market Monday | Philip K. Dick’s A Maze of Death

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A Maze of Death, Philip K. Dick. Dawn Books, first Daw printing (1983). Cover art by Bob Pepper. 191 pages.

In my review of Philip K. Dick’s 1970 novel, I wrote that A Maze of Death is

…a mishmash of metaphysical mumbo jumbo, filtered through touches of space opera and good old fashioned haunted housery. A Maze of Death is a messy space horror that threatens to leave its readers unsatisfied right up until the final moments wherein it rings its sad coda, a reverberation that nullifies all its previous twists and turns in a soothing wash of emptiness. Not the best starting place for PKD, but I’m very glad I read it.

Mass-market Monday | Harry Crews’ A Feast of Snakes

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A Feast of Snakes, Harry Crews. Ballantine Books, first edition, first printing (1978). No cover artist credited. 165 pages.

While the cover designer and artist aren’t credited, there is a signature on the back which I believe is “Gentile.” If anyone has a guess as to the artist’s full name I’d be happy to hear it.

From the novel: not quite a recipe for snakes:

When they got to his purple double-wide, Joe Lon skinned snakes in a frenzy. He picked up the snakes by the tails as he dipped them out of the metal drums and swung them around and around his head and then popped them like a cowwhip, which caused their heads to explode. Then he nailed them up on a board in the pen and skinned them out with a pair of wire pliers. Elfie was standing in the door of the trailer behind them with a baby on her hip. Full of beer and fascinated with what Joe Lon could feel—or thought he could—the weight of her gaze on his back while he popped and skinned the snakes. He finally turned and looked at her, pulling his lips back from his teeth in a smile that only shamed him.

He called across the yard to her. “Thought we’d cook up some snake and stuff, darlin, have ourselves a feast.”

Her face brightened in the door and she said: “Course we can, Joe Lon, honey.”

Elfie brought him a pan and Joe Lon cut the snakes into half-inch steaks. Duffy turned to Elfie and said: “My name is Duffy Deeter and this is something fine. Want to tell me how you cook up snakes?”

Elfie smiled, trying not to show her teeth. “It’s lots of ways. Way I do mostly is I soak’m in vinegar about ten minutes, drain’m off good, and sprinkle me a little Looseanner redhot on’m, roll’m in flour, and fry’m is the way I mostly do.”

Mass-market Monday | Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness

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The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin. Ace Books, first edition (1969). Cover art by Leo & Diane Dillon. 286 pages.

I read all of Le Guin’s Hainish novels eight years ago, and wrote this about The Left Hand of Darkness:

—The Left Hand of Darkness is amazing. Perfect in its strange imperfections and crammed with fables and myths and misunderstandings, it is the apotheosis of Le Guin’s synthesis of adventure with philosophy. Darkness is about shadows and weight. About pulling weight—literally, figuratively. It’s also the story of an ice planet. (A stranger comes to the ice planet!). It’s a political thriller. It’s a sexual thriller. But the impression that lingers strongest: The Left Hand of Darkness is one of the better literary evocations of friendship (its precarious awful strange wonderful tenuous strength) that I’ve ever read.

Mass-market Monday | American Short Stories since 1945

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American Short Stories since 1945, edited by John Hollander. Perennial Classics, first edition, 1968. Cover design by Emanuel Schongut. 525 pages.

I think it was the title and the spine that first intrigued me when I pulled American Short Stories since 1945 from the shelf of a used book store: What would the selections be? How many years does the collection span? If Emanuel Schongut’s exquisite cover didn’t sell me on the book (which it did, all two dollars of it!), then the track list on the back certainly would have. And not so much for the authors I’d already read–Gass, Pynchon, Barthelme, O’Connor, Baldwin, and so on—but for the ones I hadn’t heard of, or at least didn’t think I’d heard of. Paul Goodman? Gilbert Rogin? Jeremy Larner? George P. Elliott? The poet who compiled the collection, John Hollander, writes in his introduction that it “aims to show the major shapes taken by shorter fiction in America since the end of World War II.” It’s the sort of book I wish I’d found when I was much, much younger, the kind of mixtape that would have sent me a lot of strange, wonderful directions.

Mass-market Monday | J.G. Ballard’s Crash

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Crash, J.G. Ballard. Vintage Books, first Vintage Books edition (1985). Cover design by Carin Goldberg with art by Chris Moore. 224 pages.

A few sentences and fragments from The New York Time’s original 1973 review of Crash:

…hands-down, the most repulsive book I’ve yet to come across.

….as reader, I promise you, only a virtuoso foulness can turn my stomach.

…a crazed, morbid roundelay of dismemberment and sexual perversion.

…I could not, in conscience, recommend it. Indeed I most cordially advise against.

…monomaniacal drive.

…The protagonists are titillated by collisions as dogs are by curb smells.

…Punched out eyeballs. Blood. Vomit. Fecal matter. Decapitation. Sperm. Bifurcated, mashed genitals.

…Perhaps J.G. Ballard was traumatized at a drive-in theater.

…I certainly won’t read further in the Ballard oeuvre.

Mass-market Monday | David R. Bunch’s Moderan

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Moderan, David R. Bunch. Avon Books, first edition (1971). No cover artist credited. 240 pages.

The uncredited Boschian cover for this 1971 mass-market paperback edition of Moderan is by Norman Adams. (Adams did a similar cover in 1972 for Jack Williamson’s novel The Humanoids.)

I think copies of this volume were expensive and hard to find previous to NYRB’s 2018 release of a new edition of Moderan (which included eleven new tales). That’s the version I read—although I was happy to snap this old paperback up for three bucks at a used bookstore. I wrote of the novel in my 2018 reading round-up:

Moderan works as a post-nuke dystopian satire on toxic masculinity. The tropes here might seem familiar—cyborgs and dome homes, caste systems and ultraviolence, a world of made and not born ruled by manunkind (to steal from E.E. Cummings)—it’s the way that Bunch conveys this world that is so astounding. Moderan is told in its own idiom; the voice of our narrator Stronghold-10 booms with a bravado that’s ultimately undercut by the authorial irony that lurks under its surface. The book seems equal to the task of satirizing the trajectory of our zeitgeist in a way that some contemporary satirists have failed to.

Mass-market Monday | Herman Melville’s Redburn

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Redburn, Herman Melville. Doubleday Anchor Books (1957). Cover art by Edward Gorey. 301 pages.

Redburn is as good a place as any to start with Melville, I suppose. From Elizabeth Hardwick’s essay “Melville in Love,” which prompted me to finally read Redburn:

Melville’s state of mind is revealed…with a purity of expressiveness in the novel Redburn, one of his most appealing and certainly the most personal of his works. He is said to have more or less disowned the book, more rather than less, since he claimed it was only written for tobacco. Whether this is a serious misjudgment of his own work or a withdrawal, after the fact, from having shown his early experience of life without his notable reserve and distance is, of course, not clear. For a contemporary reader, Redburn, the grief-stricken youth, cast among the vicious, ruined men on the ship, walking the streets of Liverpool in the late 1830s, even meeting with the homosexual hustler Harry Bolton might have more interest than Typee’s breadfruit and coconut island and the nymph, Fayaway. But it is only pertinent to think of Redburn on its own: a novel written after Typee, Omoo, and Mardi in the year 1849, ten years after he left Lansingburgh to go on his first voyage.

 

Mass-market Monday | Mervyn Peake’s Titus Groan

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Titus Groan, Mervyn Peake. Ballantine Books (1968). No cover artist credited. 543 pages.

The uncredited cover artist is Bob Pepper, who also provided the covers for Ballantine editions of the other two novels in Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy, Gormenghast and Titus Alone. The covers are actually segments from one painting:

The edition also includes black and white illustrations by Peake (including eight glossy inset pages).

I have no idea how I had never even heard of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy until some point late in 2019. I grew up reading fantasy and yet somehow never encountered these strange, dense books. I consumed them in 2020, pressing extra copies on my son.

From my 2020 reading roundup end-of-year post:

Titus Groan, Mervyn Peake

The first of Mervyn Peake’s strange castle (and then not-castle trilogy (not really a trilogy, really)), Titus Groan is weird wonderful grotesque fun. Inspirited by the Machiavellian antagonist Steerpike, Titus Groan can be read as a critique of the empty rituals that underwrite modern life. It can also be read for pleasure alone.

Gormenghast, Mervyn Peake

Probably the best novel in Peake’s trilogy, Gormenghast is notable for its psychological realism, surreal claustrophobia, and bursts of fantastical imagery. We finally get to know Titus, who is a mute infant in the first novel, and track his insolent war against tradition and Steerpike. The novel’s apocalyptic diluvian climax is amazing.

Titus Alone, Mervyn Peake

A beautiful mess, an episodic, picaresque adventure that breaks all the apparent rules of the first two books. The rulebreaking is fitting though, given that Our Boy Titus (alone!) navigates the world outside of Gormenghast—a world that doesn’t seem to even understand that a Gormenghast exists (!)—Titus Alone is a scattershot epic. Shot-through with a heavy streak of Dickens, Titus Alone never slows down enough for readers to get their bearings. Or to get bored. There’s a melancholy undercurrent to the novel. Does Titus want to get back to his normal—to tradition and the meaningless lore and order that underwrote his castle existence? Or does he want to break quarantine? 

Mass-market Monday | Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude

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One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez. Translation by Gregory Rabassa. Avon Bard (1971). No cover artist credited. 383 pages.

I am a huge fan of the Avon Bard Latin American literature series. (I do wish, however, they had done a better job crediting the cover artists.)

I listened to One Hundred Years of Solitude on audiobook (narrated by John Lee) last week while undertaking a largish home project. I had read the novel maybe twelve years ago, after several false starts, and enjoyed the audiobook very much, even if the story was much, much sadder than I’d remembered. I had registered One Hundred Years of Solitude in my memory as rich and mythic, its robust humor tinged with melancholy spiked with sex and violence. That memory is only partially correct—García Márquez’s novel is darker and more pessimistic than my younger-reader-self could acknowledge.

From John Leonard’s wonderful contemporary review in The New York Times (in which he employs the word haruspex in the second sentence:

You emerge from this marvelous novel as if from a dream, the mind on fire. A dark, ageless figure at the hearth, part historian, part haruspex, in a voice by turns angelic and maniacal, first lulls to sleep your grip on a manageable reality, then locks you into legend and myth. One Hundred Years of Solitude is not only the story of the Buendia family and the Colombian town of Macondo. It is also a recapitulation of our evolutionary and intellectual experience. Macondo is Latin America in microcosm: local autonomy yielding to state authority; anticlericalism; party politics; the coming of the United Fruit Company; aborted revolutions; the rape of innocence by history. And the Buendias (inventors, artisans, soldiers lovers, mystics) seem doomed to ride biological tragi‐cycle in circles from solitude to magic to poetry to science to politics to violence back again to solitude.

 

 

Mass-market Monday | Thomas Pynchon’s V.

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V., Thomas Pynchon. Bantam Books, third printing (1964). No cover artist credited. 463 pages.

Although artist James Bama is not credited, you can see his signature on the right side of the cover, just above the horizon.

I reread V. a few years back, concluding my piece with,

The grist, grit, and horror of the big postwar world will cling to the present. Nobody’s stepping down from heaven, or Heaven, and there are no magic words—but there is a kind of love, a loving with your mouth shut, a kind of radical, earnest, transcendent love that Pynchon evokes, soils, and sanctifies here.

Mass-market Monday | Samuel R. Delany’s Nova

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Nova, Samuel R. Delany. Bantam Books, ninth printing (1979). No cover artist credited. 215 pages.

Although he is not credited, Eddie Jones is the artist for this marvelous cover to Bantam’s mass-market reprint of Delany’s 1968 novel Nova. 

Nova is one of my favorite SRD novels. Let me self-plagiarize myself from a few years ago:

I couldn’t make it through Delany’s cult favorite Dhalgren a few years back, but Nova was easier sledding. The book is a riff on Moby-Dick, tarot, monoculture, and the grail quest. It’s jammed with ideas and characters, and if it never quite coheres into something transcendent, it’s a fun quick read (even if the ending, right from the postmodern metatextual playbook is too clever by half).