General book blog.
Vargas Llosa, Mario. Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter. New York. 1982. Farrar Straus Giroux. 0374106916. Translated from the Spanish by Helen R. Lane. 374 pages. hardcover. Jacket design (c) 1982 by Tom Christopher. Jacket photograph (c) 1982 by Alicia Benavides.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
Mario Vargas Llosa has long been acknowledged as one of Latin America’s most important writers. A novelist of wide-ranging concerns, Vargas Llosa has, with AUNT JULIA AND THE SCRIPTWRITER, written his comic masterpiece-a ribald, sophisticated tale of life and love in Lima of the 1950s. In AUNT JULIA AND THE SCRIPTWRITER he tells, in fact, two stories which unfold contrapuntally. On one level, the book concerns young Mario, who, while working at a second-rate Lima radio station, becomes romantically involved with Julia, his divorced, thirty-two-year-old aunt. The development of their liaison-from fling to romance to marriage-and the scandal it creates is the keenly observed, witty main plot. Interwoven with this love affair is the tale of Pedro Camacho, Mario’s friend at the radio station, and the resident scriptwriter of outlandish soap operas which are the hit of Lima. This second story is equally funny, but the humor is darker and the conclusion serious indeed. Camacho’s plots become more and more convoluted, and his absorption in them so total that soon he dresses like his characters in order to write, and finally confuses them so completely that he must destroy them all. His Gothic tales of ruin become a parable of his own rum. AUNT JULIA AND THE SCRIPTWRITER is a wonderful, deft story which is also an account of storytelling-its pleasures and its dangers. Combining grace, humor, and an understated seriousness, the book is a brilliantly realized tour de force.
The Avon Bard edition:
Vargas Llosa, Mario. Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter. New York. 1983. Avon/Bard. 0380637278. Translated from the Spanish by Helen R. Lane. 374 pages. paperback. Front cover illustration by Victor Gadino.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
‘FUNNY, EXTRAVAGANT . . . A WONDERFULLY COMIC NOVEL ALMOST UNBELIEVABLY RICH IN CHARACTER, PLACE AND EVENT.’ - LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK REVIEW . . . ‘Me, seducing a kid? Never!’ Rich, sexy Aunt Julia wants a new husband, not a boy. But her nephew lost his virginity five whole years ago, and has now lost his head over Aunt Julia. Roses, kissing, cooing . . . will this May-September scandal ever get down to serious improprieties? Can the nephew hope for help from his hero, a crack scriptwriter of superheated soaps? While legions of soap addicts hang on the scriptwriter’s frenzied episodes of incest, murder, rape and perversion, the lovers’ happiness hangs in the balance. ‘WILL READERS TURN THE PAGES TO FIND OUT WHAT IS GOING TO HAPPEN NEXT? YES: ’ - PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER ‘UPROARIOUS ENTERTAINMENT . . . FOR SHEER WIT, IMAGINATION AND HIGH STYLE, THIS SOAP OPERA OF LOVE CANT BE BEAT: ’ - CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR . . . ‘ONE OF THE TWELVE ‘BEST NOVELS OF 1982’ – THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW.
Mario Vargas Llosa was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2010. Peru's foremost writer, he has been awarded the Cervantes Prize, the Spanish-speaking world's most distinguished literary honor, and the Jerusalem Prize. His many works include THE FEAST OF THE GOAT, THE BAD GIRL, AUNT JULIA AND THE SCRIPTWRITER, THE WAR OF THE END OF THE WORLD, and THE STORYTELLER. He lives in London.
And for a slightly different perspective:
Urquidi Illanes, Julia. My Life With Mario Vargas Llosa . New York. 1988. Peter Lang. 0820406899. Translated from the Spanish by C. R. Perricone. Series XXII Latin American Studies Vol.1. 264 pages. hardcover.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
Living in a Paris garret with a struggling young writer who has since become a famous author was not fictional for Julia Urquidi Illanes when she married Mario Vargas Llosa. This English translation is an incredible but true 'portrait of an artist as a young man' and of his aunt by marriage, whom he later fictionalized in Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter. Married for 9 years, Julia typed the first of his best-selling novels, The Time of the Hero, only to be abandoned when Mario fell in love with his first cousin Patricia, who is now his second wife. Readers will find this behind the scene account of a writer nominated for the Nobel prize gives insights into the creative processes of a novelist as it relates the range of human emotions in real life.
Julia Urquidi Illanes (30 May 1926 - 10 March 2010) was a Bolivian writer. Urquidi was born in Cochabamba. She was famous as the first wife of Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa (1955-1964) and also the namesake of one of his most famous novels, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter. In 1983 she published her memories titled Lo que Varguitas no dijo (English: What Varguitas did not say). She died in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, aged 83.The English translator Catherine R. Perricone is Professor of Foreign Languages at Auburn University specializing in current Spanish American literature. She edited Alma y Corazon (Heart and Soul) an anthology of Latin American poetesses, and has published articles on Vargas Llosa and other novelists, an extensive bibliography on feminist criticism and Spanish American poetesses, and other subjects in Hispanic literature which have appeared in such journals as Hispania, Foreign Language Annals, Circulo, USF Language Quarterly, and The Americas Review.
The Hydra Head by Carlos Fuentes. New York. 1978. Farrar Straus Giroux. Translated From The Spanish By Margaret Sayers Peden. 292 pages. Jacket design by Honi Werner. 0374173974.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
In an astonishing turnabout, Carlos Fuentes follows his most recent novel, the huge, complex, baroque, historical fantasy TERRA NOSTRA, with what is probably the first Third World spy thriller, an action-filled, quick-paced, terse novel of intrigue as contemporary as a headline. One fateful morning, Felix Maldonado, a minor official in the Mexican bureaucracy, steps into a nightmare world in which he is ensnared in a murder he never intended: the assassination of the President. As he is gradually divested of his identity, he struggles between his Dostoevskian frenzy for affirmation and the Kafkaesque passivity of oblivion others try to impose on him: the Director General of his Ministry, who first proposes that Felix surrender his name in exchange for his life; the fat economics professor, Bernstein, who believes a man is recognized only when he is not being hunted down; and the ambiguous master spy, 'Timon,' who prefers defeat to success. They are surrounded by a cast of twilight figures: Ayub, a Lebanese punk; the posturing coward Rossetti and his ambitious wife, Angelica, a lady with a penchant for adventures in swimming pools; Licha, a sensual but unsatisfied nurse; the teenage Mexican agents Rosita and Emiliano; and the women in Felix's life, all three Jewish: Ruth, his wife; Sara Klein, a survivor of the Holocaust; and Mary Benjamin, who tortures her ugly merchant husband with her infidelities. Set in the houses of the rich and in sleazy hotels and sinister hospitals in Mexico City, in the steamy Gulf ports of Coatzacoalcos and Galveston and the luxury clubs and corporate offices of Houston, THE HYDRA HEAD has a constant political reality as backdrop: the permanent tension in the Middle East and the vast new oil resources of Mexico. Behind the individual drives for power, justice, money, love, or simple survival lurk the cold imperatives of the international chessboard and its masked players. Felix is caught between both, making it impossible to know where his lust for Mary, his tenderness for Ruth, and his love for Sara stop and the hard facts of political reality begin.
Carlos Fuentes Macías (November 11, 1928 – May 15, 2012) was a Mexican novelist and essayist. Among his works are The Death of Artemio Cruz (1962), Aura (1962), The Old Gringo (1985) and Christopher Unborn (1987). In his obituary, the New York Times described him as ‘one of the most admired writers in the Spanish-speaking world’ and an important influence on the Latin American Boom, the ‘explosion of Latin American literature in the 1960s and '70s’, while The Guardian called him ‘Mexico's most celebrated novelist’. His many literary honors include the Miguel de Cervantes Prize as well as Mexico's highest award, the Belisario Domínguez Medal of Honor. He was often named as a likely candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature, though he never won.
Koba The Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million by Martin Amis. New York. 2002. Talk Miramax/Hyperion. 306 pages. jacket Design by DOYLE PARTNERS. Stalin Photograph HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES. cheka Badge Photograph courtesy of THE DAVID KING COLLECTION, LONDON. 0786868767. July 2002.
A memoir, a history, and a meditation on Stalin and his legacy.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
KOBA THE DREAD is the successor to Martin Amis's celebrated memoir, EXPERIENCE. It is largely political while remaining personal. It addresses itself to the central lacuna of twentieth-century thought: the indulgence of communism by intellectuals of the West. In between the personal beginning and the personal ending, Amis gives us perhaps the best 'short course ever in Stalin: Koba the Dread, Iosif the Terrible. The author's father, Kingsley Amis, though later reactionary in tendency, was 'a Comintern dogsbody' from 1941 to 1956. His second-closest, and then closest friend, was Robert Conquest, our leading Sovietologist, whose book of 1968, The Great Terror, was second only to Solzhenitsyn's THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO in undermining the USSR. Amis's remarkable memoir explores these connections. Stalin said that the death of one person was tragic, the death of a million a mere 'statistic. ' KOBA THE DREAD, during whose course the author absorbs a particular, a familial death, is a rebuttal of Stalin's aphorism.
Martin Amis (born 25 August 1949) is a British novelist, the author of some of Britain's best-known modern literature, including MONEY (1984) and LONDON FIELDS (1989). He is currently Professor of Creative Writing at the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester. The Times named him in 2008 as one of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945. Amis's raw material is what he sees as the absurdity of the postmodern condition and the excesses of late-capitalist Western society with its grotesque caricatures. He has thus been portrayed as the undisputed master of what The New York Times called ‘the new unpleasantness.’ Influenced by Saul Bellow, Vladimir Nabokov, and James Joyce, as well as by his father Sir Kingsley Amis, he has inspired a generation of writers with his distinctive style, including Will Self and Zadie Smith. The Guardian writes that his critics have noted what Kingsley Amis called a ‘terrible compulsive vividness in his style. that constant demonstrating of his command of English,’ and that the ‘Amis-ness of Amis will be recognizable in any piece before he reaches his first full stop.’
I, Tituba: Black Witch Of Salem by Maryse Conde. Charlottesville. 1992. University Press Of Virginia. Translated from the French by Richard Philcox. Foreword by Angela Y. Davis. 227 pages. 0813913985.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
This wild and entertaining novel expands on the true story of the West Indian slave Tituba, who was accused of witchcraft in Salem, Massachusetts, arrested in 1692, and forgotten in jail until the general amnesty for witches two years later. Maryse Condé brings Tituba out of historical silence and creates for her a fictional childhood, adolescence, and old age. She turns her into what she calls 'a sort of female hero, an epic heroine, like the legendary 'Nanny of the maroons,' who, schooled in the sorcery and magical ritual of obeah, is arrested for healing members of the family that owns her.
Maryse Condé (born February 11, 1937) is a Guadeloupean, French-language author of historical fiction, best known for her novel Segu (1984–1985). Born as Maryse Boucolon at Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe, she was the youngest of eight children. After having graduated from high school, she was sent to Lycée Fénelon and Sorbonne in Paris, where she majored in English. In 1959, she married Mamadou Condé, a Guinean actor. After graduating, she taught in Guinea, Ghana and Senegal. In 1981, she divorced, but the following year married Richard Philcox, English language translator of most of her novels. In addition to her writings, Condé had a distinguished academic career. In 2004 she retired from Columbia University as Professor Emerita of French. She had previously taught at the University of California, Berkeley, UCLA, the Sorbonne, The University of Virginia, and the University of Nanterre. Condé's novels explore racial, gender and cultural issues in a variety of historical eras and locales, including the Salem witch trials in I, Tituba: Black Witch of Salem (1992) and the 19th-century Bambara Empire of Mali in Segu (1987). Her novels trace the relationships between African peoples and the diaspora, especially the Caribbean. She has taken considerable distance from most Caribbean literary movements, such as Negritude and Creolité, and has often focused on topics with strong feminist concerns. A radical activist in her work as well as in her personal life, Condé has admitted: ‘I could not write anything... unless it has a certain political significance. I have nothing else to offer that remains important.’ Her recent writings have become increasingly autobiographical, such as Memories of My Childhood and Victoire, a biography of her grandmother. Who Slashed Celanire's Throat also shows traces of Condé's paternal great-grandmother.
In The Skin Of A Lion by Michael Ondaatje. New York. 1987. Knopf. 244 pages. Jacket illustration & design by Bascove. 0394563638. September 1987.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
Michael Ondaatje's previous books - THE COLLECTED WORKS OF BILLY THE KID, COMING THROUGH SLAUGHTER, and RUNNING IN THE FAMILY - have earned him the respect and praise of his fellow writers. Now, with his new novel, IN THE SKIN OF A LION, he has written a book that is certain to gain him the wider readership he so richly deserves. We begin with a young girl sitting in a car in the early morning hours. The man beside her is telling her a story, his story - of his boyhood in the Canadian backwoods, of his arrival in the bustling Toronto of the 1920s, of the passionate and fabulous adventures he underwent there. His name is Patrick Lewis, and as his tale unfolds, other people come forward to illuminate his life: the two women - friends, actresses - whom he loved. an elusive millionaire. a charmed thief. a nun blown off a bridge, only to be plucked - in midair - to safety. Each has his or her moment at the center of the story, as it progresses, as it doubles back on itself, as its full meaning and splendor are finally revealed. Combining history and poetry, mythic events and sensual detail, Michael Ondaatje has fashioned a luminous work of the imagination. 'A dazzling novel of power and style, dealing with human situations through verbal cinema. An extraordinary performance on the level - and beyond - of Ondaatje's THE COLLECTED WORKS OF BILLY THE KID and COMING THROUGH SLAUGHTER. He has invented a new form. ' - Leon Edel. 'Michael Ondaatje's fiction is as original and evocative as any being written today. A brilliantly imaginative blend of history, lore, passion and poetry, In the Skin of a Lion is his best book. ' - Russell Banks.
MICHAEL ONDAATJE was born in Sri Lanka. He left there at the age of eleven to go to school in England. He went to Canada in 1962 and now lives in Toronto, where he teaches at Glendon College, York University. His books include a fictional memoir about his family in Sri Lanka, RUNNING IN THE FAMILY; COMING THROUGH SLAUGHTER, a novel based on the life and music of Buddy Bolden; and THE COLLECTED WORKS OF BILLY THE KID. His books of poetry include THERE'S A TRICK WITH A KNIFE I'M LEARNING TO DO and SECULAR LOVE.
Written Lives by Javier Marias. New York. 2006. New Directions. Translated From The Spanish By Margaret Jull Costa. 200 pages. Jacket art detail of a photograph of Rudyard Kipling courtesy of the author. Design by Semadar Megged. 081121611x.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
In addition to his own busy career as 'one of Europe's most intriguing contemporary writers', Javier Marias is also the translator into Spanish of works by Hardy, Stevenson, Conrad, Faulkner, Nabokov, and Laurence Sterne. His love for these authors is the touchstone of WRITTEN LIVES. Collected here are twenty pieces recounting great writers' lives, 'or, more precisely, snippets of writers' lives.' Thomas Mann, Rilke, Arthur Conan Doyle, Turgenev, Djuna Barnes, Emily Bronte, Malcolm Lowry, and Kipling appear, and 'almost nothing' in his stories is invented. Like Isak Dinesen, Marias has a sharp eye. Nabokov is here, making 'the highly improbable assertion that he is 'as American as April in Arizona,' as is Oscar Wilde, who, in debt on his deathbed, ordered up champagne, remarking cheerfully, 'I am dying beyond my means.' Faulkner, we find, when fired from his post office job, explained that he was not prepared 'to be beholden to any son-of-a-bitch who had two cents to buy a stamp.' Affection glows in the pages of WRITTEN LIVES, evidence, as Marias remarks, that 'although I have enjoyed writing all my books, this was the one with which I had the most fun.'
Javier Marias was born in Madrid, Spain, in 1951, into a very literary family. He earned his first paycheck at age twenty translating Dracula scripts into Spanish for his uncle, the movie director Jesus Franco. Today his own work is translated into thirty-four languages, and four and a half million copies of his books have sold worldwide. His many prizes include the prestigious IMPAC Dublin International Literary award for A Heart So White. He currently lives in Madrid.
Sally Hemings by Barbara Chase-Riboud. New York. 1979. Viking Press. hardcover. 348 pages. June 1979. Jacket painting by Cornelia Gray. 0670616052.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
One of the greatest love stories in American history is also one of the least known, and most controversial. Thomas Jefferson, third president of the United States and author of the Declaration of Independence, had a mistress for thirty-eight years, whom he loved and lived with until he died, the beautiful and elusive Sally Hemings. But it was not simply that Jefferson had a mistress that provoked the scandal of the times; it was that Sally Hemings was a quadroon slave, and that Jefferson fathered a slave family, many of whose descendents, known and unknown, are alive today. In this moving novel, which spans two continents, sixty years, and seven presidencies, Barbara Chase-Riboud re-creates a love story, based on the documents and evidence of the day but giving free rein to the novelist’s imagination. The story opens in the Paris of 1787, two scant years before the French Revolution and but a decade after the start of our own, where Thomas Jefferson is serving as the American ambassador to the court of France. A widower, Jefferson had brought his elder daughter, Martha, to France with him, but now he decides to bring over his younger daughter, Polly, as well. Sent with her as maid and servant is fourteen-year-old Sally Hemings. Over the next several months Jefferson grows increasingly infatuated with his slave, and before long becomes her lover. Highly intelligent and sensitive, and increasingly educated and sophisticated through her Paris sojourn, Sally Hemings could have opted not to return to America when Jefferson was called home, could have chosen freedom on the basis that slavery had been abolished on French soil. Bit she did return with Jefferson to Monticello, thus reenslaving herself to him. She never left Monticello again, and Jefferson, despite pressures to do so, did not remarry; the reason, no doubt, was Sally Hemings. Woven into this rich and complex narrative of love and enslavement is the story of the early Republic and of the personages of Aaron Burr, Dolley and James Madison, John and Abigail Adams, and John Trumbull. And like a series of somber counterpoints to the compelling love story are three salient themes: the slave rebellions of Gabriel Prosser and Nat Turner; murders, those of George Wythe, Jefferson’s old professor and benefactor, and of George, the Lewis slave in Kentucky; and, above all, survival, that of Sally Hemings but also that of her indomitable mother, Elizabeth. Here were two generations of slave mistresses: Sally Hemings, mistress to a president, and her mother, mistress to a president’s father-in-law. The strange and complex ties between these two American families - the Jeffersons and the Hemingses, one white, one black—form in a sense the underside of our history. In this brilliant novel, Barbara Chase-Riboud presents the remarkable love story of Jefferson and Hemings as a poignant, tragic, and unforgettable addendum to the history of the races, and of the sexes, in America.
Barbara Chase-Riboud (born June 26, 1939) is an American novelist, poet, sculptor and visual artist best known for her historical fiction. Much of her work has explored themes related to slavery and exploitation. Chase-Riboud attained international recognition with the publication of her first novel, SALLY HEMINGS, in 1979. The novel has been described as the ‘first full blown imagining’ of Hemings' life as a slave and her relationship with Jefferson. In addition to stimulating considerable controversy, the book earned Chase-Riboud the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for the best novel written by an American woman. She has received numerous honors for her work, including the Carl Sandburg Prize for poetry and the Women's Caucus for Art's lifetime achievement award. In 1965, she became the first American woman to visit the People's Republic of China after the revolution and in 1996, she was knighted by the French Government and received the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
The President's Daughter by Barbara Chase-Riboud. New York. 1994. Crown. hardcover. 469 pages. October 1994. Jacket art: Monticello, 1821, by Jefferson Vail. Jacket design by Ken Sansome. 0517598612.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
In 1979 Barbara Chase-Riboud made literary history when she published SALLY HEMINGS to critical praise. Not only did the novel spend six weeks on the New York Times best-seller list and sell 1.6 million copies worldwide, SALLY HEMINGS also accomplished the impossible: It breathed life into a historical enigma. The novel also established Sally Hemings as the emblematic incarnation of many things that were forbidden in this country at that time. Now, Barbara Chase-Riboud is back with THE PRESIDENT’S DAUGHTER, the provocative continuation of the irrefutable historical chronicle of Sally Hemings - Thomas Jefferson’s mistress, the mother of his children, and the slave he would never set free - even when the scandal nearly cost him the presidency. Epic in proportion, yet rendered in exquisite detail by a writer with the eye of a historian and the heart of a storyteller, THE PRESIDENT‘S DAUGHTER begins in 1822 and tells the story of Harriet Hemings, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings’s beautiful and headstrong slave daughter. Harriet is allowed to run away from Monticello and pass for white, as Jefferson had promised Sally their children would be able to do. Harriet experiences the turbulent events leading up to the American Civil War and is eventually thrust into the very heart of the Battle of Gettysburg, where she becomes a kind of Philadelphian Scarlett O’Hara. As THE PRESIDENT’S DAUGHTER draws to a close during the 1876 Centennial celebration in Philadelphia, Harriet receives an anonymous letter that contains the memoirs of her brother Madison Hemings - who is living his life on the black side of the color line. Harriet realizes that someone in her entourage, perhaps even her own husband, knows she is indeed the president’s daughter. In the Chase-Riboud tradition, THE PRESIDENT’S DAUGHTER is more than just the good read it seems at first glance. In truth, not since Mark Twain in the classic masterpiece PUDD’NHEAD WILSON has a major American writer evoked the ambiguity, pathos, complexity, and emotion of the American identity so brilliantly. Barbara Chase-Riboud has written another classic masterpiece of race, love, and color in America.
Barbara Chase-Riboud (born June 26, 1939) is an American novelist, poet, sculptor and visual artist best known for her historical fiction. Much of her work has explored themes related to slavery and exploitation. Chase-Riboud attained international recognition with the publication of her first novel, SALLY HEMINGS, in 1979. The novel has been described as the ‘first full blown imagining’ of Hemings' life as a slave and her relationship with Jefferson. In addition to stimulating considerable controversy, the book earned Chase-Riboud the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for the best novel written by an American woman. She has received numerous honors for her work, including the Carl Sandburg Prize for poetry and the Women's Caucus for Art's lifetime achievement award. In 1965, she became the first American woman to visit the People's Republic of China after the revolution and in 1996, she was knighted by the French Government and received the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
A Childhood by Harry Crews. New York. 1978. Harper & Row. 171 pages. Jacket design by Honi Werner. 0060109327. October 1978.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
A CHILDHOOD is the unforgettable memoir of Harry Crews's earliest years, a sharply remembered portrait of the people, locales, and circumstances that shaped him - and destined him to be a storyteller. Crews was born in the middle of the Great Depression, in a one-room sharecropper's cabin at the end of a dirt road in rural south Georgia. If Bacon County was a place of grinding poverty, poor soil, and blood feuds, it was also a deeply mystical place, where snakes talked, birds could possess a small boy by spitting in his mouth, and faith healers and conjure women kept ghosts and devils at bay. At once shocking and elegiac, heartrending and comical, A CHILDHOOD not only recalls the transforming events of Crews's youth but conveys his growing sense of self in a world 'in which survival depended on raw courage, a courage born out of desperation and sustained by a lack of alternatives.'
And, in an illustrated edtion by University of Georgia Press:
Crews, Harry. A Childhood. Athens. 1995. University Of Georgia Press. 0820317594. Illustrated by Michael McCurdy. 192 pages. hardcover.
Harry Eugene Crews (7 June 1935 – 28 March 2012) was an American novelist, playwright, short story writer and essayist. He was born in Bacon County, Georgia in 1935 and served in the Marines during the Korean War. He attended the University of Florida on the GI Bill, but dropped out to travel. Eventually returning to the university, Harry finally graduated and moved his wife, Sally, and son, Patrick Scott, to Jacksonville where he taught Junior High English for a year. Crews returned to Gainesville and the university to work on his master's in English Education. It was during this period that he and Sally divorced for the first time. Harry continued his studies, graduated, and – denied entrance into UF's Creative Writing program – took a teaching position at Broward Community College in the subject of English. It was here in south Florida that Harry convinced Sally to return to him, and they were re-married. A second son, Byron, was born to them in 1963. He returned to University of Florida in 1968 not as a student, but as a member of the faculty in Creative Writing. Crews formerly taught in the creative writing program at the University of Florida. In 1964, Patrick Scott drowned in a neighbor's pool. This proved to be too heavy a burden on the family, and Harry and Sally were once again divorced. His first published novel, The Gospel Singer, appeared in 1968. His novels include: A Feast of Snakes, The Hawk is Dying, Body, Scar Lover, The Knockout Artist, Karate Is A Thing of the Spirit, All We Need of Hell, The Mulching of America, Car, and Celebration. He published a memoir in 1978 titled A Childhood: The Biography of a Place. Crews wrote essays for Esquire, Playboy, and Fame. He had a column in Esquire called ‘Grits’ for fourteen months in the 1970s, where he covered such topics as cockfighting and dog fighting. Harry had a tattoo on his right arm which said: ‘How do you like your blue eyed boy Mr. Death’ (from the poem Buffalo Bill's by e.e. cummings) beneath a skull. The University of Georgia acquired Harry Crews's papers in August 2006. The archive includes manuscripts and typescripts of his fiction, correspondence, and notes made by Crews while on assignment. He died 28 March 2012, from complications of neuropathy.
Strange Loyalties by William McIlvanney. New York. 1992. Morrow. 281 pages. Jacket design & illustration by Lawrence Ratzkin. 068811413x.
The third book in William McIlvanney's Laidlaw Scottish mystery series. As much a study of loss and guilt as a traditional mystery. McIlvanney's people are real and well drawn.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
Detective Inspector Jack Laidlaw is back. It is a tribute to William McIlvanney that the occasion should be so eagerly anticipated. The normal mode for building an audience for a fictional detective is a large number of titles delivered in quick succession by contrast, LAIDLAW - the first novel of McIlvanney's sequence - appeared in 1977, and the second, THE PAPERS OF TONY VEITCH, only after a long interval in 1983. Now, eight years later, he makes his third appearance in STRANGE LOYALTIES. As in the earlier books, he is obsessed by an obscure death and is seen by his colleagues as a man near breaking point, driven by a private morality to work at the profession's outer edges. This time, however, the line between investigator and victim is blurred. The dead man is Laidlaw's younger brother, and the investigation takes him back to his roots in Ayrshire from which the not-so-grieving widow has departed and where Laidlaw learns from others of the breakdown of the marriage and his brother's increasing unpredictability in the months before his death under the wheels of a car. With a week's leave and a bottle of Antiquary, Laidlaw sets himself the task of finding out more. To this main plot is added a murder investigation being conducted back in Glasgow into the killing of drug pusher Meece Rooney. The linking of plot and subplot is achieved with the craft of an experienced novelist. The criminal Eddie Foley, for example, is seen in a similar light to the businessman Dave Lyons, who regards the law as 'a set of rules for those who get caught. ' Laidlaw himself is never more persuasively a policeman than when he is passing judgment: a drug dealer gets the thumbs down; an adulterous wife is convicted of lacking the courage of her sins; he scrutinizes himself constantly for lapses from his own standard of conduct. To live behind hedges, draw the curtains, shut out others, begins to seem like the humanist equivalent of sinning against the Holy Ghost. Laidlaw's antecedents are an odd mixture of traditions. There is recognizably a strain of Chandler, the writer who gave crime back to the people who commit it and sent Marlowe down mean streets armed only with integrity and a wisecrack. But it is the unrelenting seriousness of his moral concern which makes Laidlaw different. As a crime novel, STRANGE LOYALTIES does not engage the Glasgow underworld with the ferocious infatuation of the earlier books. It contains instead some of McIlvanney's best set pieces on suburban values; and arguably the finest ending he has achieved. Crime fiction needs Laidlaw back before another eight years have passed.' - The Scotsman.
William McIlvanney is widely credited as the founder of the Tartan Noir movement that includes authors such as Denise Mina, Ian Banks, and Val McDermid, all of whom cite him as an influence and inspiration. McIlvanney’s Laidlaw trilogy “changed the face of Scottish fiction” (The Times of London), his Docherty won the Whitbread Award for Fiction, and his Laidlaw and The Papers of Tony Veitch both gained Silver Daggers from the Crime Writers’ Association. Strange Loyalties won the Glasgow Herald’s People’s Prize. William passed away in December 2015.